The Cost of Not Doing Mentoring is Too Great to Ignore

Here at Guider, we’ve been advocating for the benefits of mentoring for years. If you want to see better retention, career progression, and support your diversity & inclusion and wellbeing programs – then get a mentoring program.

But what we need to talk about is the cost of not doing mentoring.

You may think that mentoring is simply nice to have but we firmly believe that it’s essential. In fact, many major businesses seem to agree: 84% of Fortune 500 companies and 100% of Fortune 50 companies have mentoring programs.

This is because there are not only tangible benefits to mentoring for your people, but these benefits can save you real-time and money in the long run.

‍The cost of not doing mentoring

We’ve broken the cost of not doing mentoring down into 4 key areas:

Cost to employee retention

Did you know that the average cost of staff turnover per employee is £30,614? Or that it can be 1.5 or 2 times the employee’s salary? And to make matters worse a loss of productivity and higher workload for other employees leads to a cycle of even more staff turnover, compounding the problem.

The good news is that mentoring has a positive impact on retention. Retention rates are much higher for mentees (72%) and for mentors (69%) than for employees who do not participate in mentoring (49%).

That’s a difference of 23% between mentored and non-mentored staff. To put that into perspective – that could mean a saving of more than £700k per 100 people per year using the average cost of staff turnover above.

The good news is, 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if they were offered opportunities to learn and grow – and we know that mentoring is a great way of up-skilling employees and fostering career progression.

Cost to productivity

Keeping your team productive has obvious benefits to your company’s bottom line. Research shows that workers spend 1 hour 24 minutes of the day being unproductive, costing British businesses £143 billion each year. In the US, labour productivity fell by 7.5% in the first quarter of 2022 – the largest decline since 1947.

To keep your teams productive you might think about a range of incentives to keep your people motivated. Luckily, 67% of businesses reported an increase in productivity due to mentoring, and a further 55% felt that mentoring had a positive impact on their bottom line.

Best of all, mentoring ticks multiple boxes at once. Using mentoring you can up-skill your employees, connect them across the business, and engage them in learning that will increase productivity as well as providing a valuable workplace benefit. Saving you money from lost productivity.

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“It’s been a real eye-opener for me for how easily we can connect all the different people within the business, and not only connect them, but share everybody’s fantastic skills.” – Suzie King, Programme Manager, M&S

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Cost to employee engagement

Keeping employees engaged at work feeds directly into retention and productivity efforts. When people disengage their productivity drops and they start to look elsewhere. Meaning the effects of poor engagement on your bottom line and hiring costs can be huge.

Estimates show that the cost of disengagement to the UK economy is £340 billion every year due to lost training, productivity, creativity and innovation, sick days and recruitment costs.

71% of people with a mentor say their company provides them with good opportunities to advance in their career, compared with 47% of those without a mentor. And 89% of those with mentors believe their colleagues value their work, compared to 75% who aren’t mentored.

Opportunities to advance, feeling valued and engaged in your work are top priorities for our changing workforce. Get these right and you can keep your people engaged at work, boosting productivity and retention rates across the board.

Read our article on Ways to Increase Employee Engagement here

Cost to your HR leads

Lastly, and by no means least, all of the above means more time spent by your HR and L&D teams – and their time and energy aren’t free. Juggling the cost of all three of these areas isn’t easy, so you’ll want to invest in effective and efficient solutions.

Our client, one of the world’s largest football organisations, has seen this first hand. To maximise the impact of a small but focused team, they implemented Guider’s mentoring platform and quickly achieved 1.5 times the total contract ROI in the first 4 weeks. This was after a launch that was 3 times quicker launch than estimated due to platform efficiencies.

Mentoring really is an all-in-one solution to tackling retention, enticing new hires, building a positive working culture and so much more. By not investing in mentoring, your people will be spending their energy working on avoidable issues.

‍ Read more on setting up a mentoring program here.

So, what are you waiting for? When you look at the costs of low retention, low engagement, declining productivity and increased stress for your teams, investing in one effective solution really is a no-brainer.

And if you make the investment in mentoring today, you’ll be saving yourself a huge headache and a lot of money later down the line!

If you’re looking to reap the rewards that mentoring has to offer, saving time and money in the process, then talk to Guider.