Staffing the Suite

Effective Mentoring Programs Yield Benefits for All

Do you remember the passion you felt about your work when you first entered your field? In today's fast-paced healthcare settings, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this excitement, and many young nurses lose their spark quickly and become burned out. Mentoring can help bring this drive back into focus.

While most people agree that mentoring is a good idea in theory, healthcare facilities can sometimes find it difficult to put into practice. How can you develop an effective mentoring program in your organization when there never seems to be enough time, budget or people resources?

The concept of mentoring originated in Greek mythology. In Homer's The Odyssey, before Odysseus leaves to fight in the Trojan War, he asks his trusted friend, Mentor, to stay behind and guide his son, Telemachus, from youth to adulthood. In a professional sense, modern-day mentoring occurs anytime an experienced nurse helps nurture the career of a less-experienced employee.

Typically, this takes place through a combination of job shadowing, one-on-one meetings and other interpersonal activities.

Mentoring is still, at its core, a caring, informal relationship between two people.

Recognizing this fact upfront can help you avoid the trap of concentrating too heavily on the potential benefits to your organization and losing sight of the human element.

Unlike other forms of education or training, mentors and mentees enter this relationship because they want to, not because you want or need them to.

While the mentee is the primary focus, everybody benefits. Mentees learn new skills, transition into the next level of their careers and gain a confidant who can help them resolve workplace conflicts. Mentors experience the intrinsic benefits of teaching and revisit the reasons they joined the field in the first place. And in turn, this dynamic relationship benefits management in a few key areas:

• Coverage. With nurses learning new areas, you gain a more well-rounded, flexible staff that can better cover shortage areas in a pinch, until a fulltime replacement is found. And if a mentee really enjoys this new work, he or she could be a potential candidate to fill that gap permanently.

• Retention. As many organizations are learning, higher salaries alone can offer a quick fix to keep people from leaving, but they do not solve job dissatisfaction — the underlying issue in many cases of high turnover. And, for healthcare organizations facing declining profits and budget cuts, offering higher salaries are not always an option.

• Recruitment. When your organization establishes a successful mentoring program and earns the reputation for caring about your staff's career development, it becomes an attractive destination for nurses. Like other benefits, a mentoring program should be discussed with prospective new hires.

Sound good so far? Here are a few tips for setting up your own effective mentoring program:

• Give someone oversight.

Mentoring programs need structure to succeed. Appointing a coordinator helps to keep the big picture in mind, choose appropriate pairings and serve as a central resource to your mentors. This person can also help define boundaries, such as what is expected of both the mentor and mentee.

• Choose your mentors carefully.

Not everybody can, or wants to be a mentor.

Ideally, mentors should be those nurses who are positive role models with good clinical skills, adept at teaching, have good communication skills and are open-minded to cross-generational differences.

• Recognize that anybody can be a mentee.

While you want to be careful when choosing mentors, don't rule out potential mentees such as experienced nurses who may be considering a career shift to an entirely new area. The same is true for new nurse managers who are often selected for their clinical ability, but may have little or no management experience.

Pairing them with an experienced manager can help smooth this transition.

• Support your mentors.

Management must buy into the program and provide resources so that mentors can succeed. Ongoing education through mentoring books, videos and other training tools can help your mentors become more effective guides to your staff.

Remember that mentoring your nurses does not replace the need to manage them. Unlike a supervisor/employee relationship, mentors should guide, but mentees should have the final choice in how they choose to take the advice.

• Reward your mentors.

While mentoring is enjoyable, it is also a significant time commitment. Recognizing this contribution to your organization can help ensure that mentors don't get fed up with the extra workload and drop out of the program. Establish rewards for areas such as proven retention success. These rewards can include everything from financial compensation or perks like flexible scheduling and extra personal days — whatever works best in your particular culture.

• Define a clear exit strategy.

While mentoring arrangements can yield lifelong friendships, the actual workbased part of the relationship should not go on forever. Having mentees define their own goals for the mentoring establishes a clear indicator for completion of their training. But what do you do if the relationship doesn't work out for either the mentor or mentee? These types of transition issues must be explored upfront before starting your program, so they don't become problems later.

In the end, an effective mentoring program can lead to other benefits for your organization. Nurses who have experienced a good mentoring relationship may choose to mentor to other nurses in your facility, or even high school or college students who have expressed interest in the field. This type of community involvement helps to raise the visibility of your organization and can foster an interest in nursing in the next generation — ultimately serving as one more strategy in the quest to solve the nursing shortage.

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