Employee engagement is front of mind for most HR managers as companies figure out how to keep their employees connected in hybrid and remote work environments. Certainly, Zoom happy hours and virtual cooking classes are ways for teammates to bond, but organizations need long-term, consistent solutions to facilitate meaningful connections.

Mentorship can play a significant part in an organization’s employee engagement efforts, and working in remote or hybrid environments makes it tricky for employees to connect with mentors. As more people continue to work outside of the office, more companies are seeking out solutions that formalize mentorship in their work environments.

Platforms like ours, Ten Thousand Coffees, offer large companies an all-in-one hub for informal learning and employee career development, with features like Office Hours, Smart Match, and Introductions.

With many options to choose from, we wanted to help narrow down the best mentorship platform for your organization. We compared our product to another mentorship platform, Chronus.

Ten Thousand Coffees

Ten Thousand Coffees (10KC) is an informal learning platform that helps companies with employee development. We offer mentorship as a solution, but do more than pair employees and facilitate meetings. Our platform offers Office Hours, a way for leaders to connect with people at all levels of the company. We also offer an in-depth organization chart where colleagues can search for peers and leaders with complementary skillsets, experiences, or interests to facilitate informal meetups.

Another benefit of our platform is that key components of the experience are pushed to the employee’s email inbox, as well as Slack, with no extra login needed for employees to regularly engage in their mentorship programs. The platform is also compatible with most HRIS systems and uses SSO (single sign on), which reduces the administrative burden on your IT team. Other benefits include:

• Smart Matching to colleagues and experiences that align with individuals’ goals, both 1:1 and in small groups with leaders.
• Offering conversation starters to make introductions more meaningful.
• Providing discussion guides for each step of the mentoring process.
• Sending emails to remind people to meet.
• Displays a comprehensive, real-time data dashboard that lets HR leaders and program managers know how employees are engaging with their mentorship programs.

Customization: Ten Thousand Coffees matches employees with mentors using a customizable algorithm based on their company’s goals and business needs. HR teams and program administrators can decide how people are matched, whether that’s based on their level, role, function, or by a custom attribute.

The 10KC experience can also be branded and customized with your company’s logo, URL, community name and profile fields.

Reporting: The 10KC data dashboard shows how mentor/mentee pairs are performing, including conversation outcomes and feedback to improve the mentorship experience. It also automatically sends surveys to collect data about the quality and frequency of the mentor/mentee matches as well as the mentorship program.

Success story: In 2020, Ten Thousand Coffee’s client McKesson was named one of the best places to work in Montreal by Canada’s Top 100 Employers. Leaders called out 10KC as a part of their success, saying the “McKesson Cafe” they created using Ten Thousand Coffees was a key tool in connecting employees with senior leaders for coaching and advice.

Customer reviews:

“10KC’s customer service is second to none and responds very quickly if there is a glitch or issue that needs to be sorted out.

“10KC has been amazing to work with, and the platform has exceeded our expectations! I highly recommend it for employers looking for interns, new hires, employees, etc. to network with each other and to help have those ‘water cooler’ moments in a virtual environment.”

“Love the automated smart matching and overall automation which saves our early career team time and resources in running a summer intern networking program. Also it is a very user-friendly product with smart nudges and reminders.”

Chronus

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Chronus’ mentorship software pairs a matchmaking platform with a library of resources that teaches participants how to make the most of mentorship. Chronus offers a desktop software and an app, and it provides the ability for administrators to:

• Create customizable employee profiles to establish match criteria
• Choose how matches take place, whether that’s self-, admin-, or bulk-selected, or a mix of the three
• Embed best practices into the platform so mentors and mentees have easy access to them during the mentorship process

One of Chronus’ main selling points is its proprietary MatchIQ algorithm which pairs mentors and mentees. It uses AI to create stronger matches and is designed to improve the quality and productivity of these relationships.

Customization: Chronus is highly customizable. It has pre-built mentorship templates and workflows that you can choose from to best reflect the type of program your organization would like to build. It also offers tailored branding and Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) integrations. User profiles can also be tailored to feature criteria your company finds most important.

Reporting: Chronus primarily collects feedback from mentor/mentee surveys. It also has a live dashboard with metrics like retention levels and percent increase in job changes to demonstrate success.

Success story: McGraw Hill used Chronus to develop a career mentorship program. The company wanted to structure employee learning and give employees more individualized attention. As a result of implementing Chronus, McGraw-Hill reported an increase in the number of employees mentored and improved job effectiveness.

Customer reviews:

“A major reason we chose Chronus over other software vendors is because the technology is nimble enough to grow with our program. Unlike other software vendors we considered, we felt like Chronus was able to provide the technology we needed today as young program and will want down the road as our programs grows.”

“The people and support structure at Chronus are excellent. The tool and system continues to provide new functionality and features, which is great. We are able to tailor the program and track to our particular interests beyond, but related to, mentoring.”

“The site is extremely user friendly for the administrator, mentors and mentees. Recently, I did bench marking with other school mentor programs and [Chronus] was an extremely popular program.”

Choose the Right Mentorship Platform Based on Your Needs

Solutions like Ten Thousand Coffees and Chronus make formal mentorship programs easier than ever to implement. Choosing the right solution largely comes down to whether your company wants a platform that offers other features besides mentorship pairing or one that focuses exclusively on it. But in either case, the most important choice you can make for your company’s mentorship program is to get one started.