Developing staff through mentoring

As a business owner, you can use mentoring as a way to develop staff skills at little or no cost to your business. This can help you promote staff internally, which can avoid expensive and time-consuming recruitment processes and ensure that valuable knowledge stays within your business.

Mentoring can also help your business:

• improve staff retention rates and team relations
• increase profits through improved performance and productivity
• foster innovative ideas.

By pairing a more-experienced person (the mentor) with a less-experienced one (the mentee), you can use mentoring:

• as a form of induction for new staff
• to develop staff skills in a particular area, such as customer service
• to groom existing staff to move into more senior roles
• for succession planning, if you plan to hand your business over to someone else.

This guide explains how you can develop your staff through mentoring.