Research Shows a Key Way To Promote Diversity in Your Workplace

Fitting in a new role can be a great experience but for many it can come with anxiety and worry. There will be opportunities for you to flex your organization muscles, demonstrate your ability to lead and create the connections necessary for your success.

But there can be pitfalls, especially if you’re not part of majority group in the office. Recently, Ed Yong at The Atlantic reported on a study of a group of female engineering students. Some were given male mentors, some female mentors, and others no mentors.

The study found that students with female mentors “felt more accepted by their peers and less invisible. They were more confident in their engineering skills and more likely to think they had a talent for the subject. They were more likely to think that their ability to overcome their academic challenges outweighed the stress and uncertainty they felt,” wrote Yong.

The results of this multi-year study underscores the success found in working with a mentor to grow in new roles. And luckily for us, there a number of options to make new employees and employers lives easier. Chronus and MentorCliq are corporate software packages that matches mentors with mentees and tracks their development.

Chronus, led by executives from Oracle and Microsoft, offers custom programming for different circumstances such as an educational setting, workplace or professional organization. MentorCliq, which has similar features, allow you to create individual profiles and connect mentor and mentees with the correct resources.

Of course, the success of mentorship ultimately depends on the commitment of both mentor and mentee, But more structure and a way to gauge return on investment can help get the most out of these critical early stages of taking over a new role.