Employee Mentoring

[Lynn Kiser]

I have recently started in a position of team coordinator for a small call center. We have several staff members who have been with the company for a couple of years or more. I would like to begin a mentoring/career pathing program with them and am looking for any suggestions you may have. Thanks!

[Mark Brannan]

Lynn,

We do a bunch of both (mentoring and career path) here. I'm not sure what type of center you have, so my info may not exactly apply. We run a technical support center - where our agents work part of their day on incoming calls, and part of their day doing research, testing, training, etc and calling customers back to complete solutions.

Our career path (simplified) is designed so that as an employee becomes more senior or progresses through the path, they work less of the incoming time, and more of the "other" time. Responsibilities are added to the new career levels, so that their "other" time can be used for mentoring.

Each new employee spends their first week of phone time with a mentor - which are those senior employees. In addition, we mentor for cross training, so even if a senior employee picks up a new skill, they will get a mentor from another senior person with that skill. This provides quite a bit of opportunity to mentor.

Let me know if you have other questions -