The hidden ROI of mentoring that nobody is measuring

Mentoring is one of the oldest development tools in the book. In and outside of work, people have been guiding others up the ladder they’ve just climbed for years. It's human nature to share what we know with those who come after us.

Speaking of human nature: Humans have seemingly evolved to be addicted to tracking things. Everything from the individual pages of the books we’ve read, to the miles we’ve run, to the calories we’ve eaten gets neatly logged and offered up for the algorithm. And yet, when it comes to our learning platform, we don’t apply the same level of detail. 

Most organisations can’t actually tell you what their mentoring programme is worth. In this blog, we’ll delve into the hidden ROI you’re missing. 

What the measurement gap is costing you

Organisations spend heavily on formal learning. Content libraries, compliance modules, formal certifications… Everything is monitored and tied back to business outcomes. 

Meanwhile, mentoring tends to be scattered across disparate spreadsheets, or lying dormant in a Slack channel called #mentoring-matching that nobody pays attention to or owns. 

Mentoring is also seen as hard to measure. Therefore, it gets treated as a lower priority. It becomes a far-away goal; something to be pushed further along the roadmap when there’s more budget and bandwidth. 

But the issue with that logic is this: The things that mentoring does well, like building confidence and career progression, are exactly the things organisations say they’re struggling with most. The development tool that tackles the hardest problems is also the one with the least amount of scrutiny.

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What the returns look like

"The highest-return development activity in most organisations is the one nobody thought to put a number on."

We’ll start with retention, because it’s where the financial case is the clearest. 

It’s expensive to replace an employee. Most organisations grit their teeth and swallow the cost of recruitment and the slower pace while the replacement finds their feet. 

A mentoring programme that swerves these costs by keeping even a handful of high-potential employees from working out the door will pay for itself several times over. Research has found that workers with mentors are happier in their jobs than those without, so it’s not hard to see why this is such a powerful tool for employee retention. 

Mentoring also does something that formal learning can’t replicate: Transfers the kind of tacit knowledge that lives inside someone’s head rather than a course module – like how to navigate a tricky stakeholder, or why the approach that worked at their last company won’t land here. 

Then there’s the cultural message mentoring clearly sends. It says: “We invest real time in developing colleagues.” That tells everyone in the organisation something important about what’s really valued, which then has a knock-on effect on engagement and belonging. 

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Why most organisations can't see any of this

So if mentoring is so powerful, why isn’t anyone tracking it?

The measurement gap exists for a few reasons, and most of them are fixable.

Mentoring sits outside the LMS. Most learning platforms are built around content consumption such as completions or time spent. Mentoring doesn't produce any of those metrics, so it doesn't get captured. If your reporting infrastructure only recognises formal learning activity, mentoring is effectively invisible.

Success isn't defined upfront. If you launch a mentoring programme without deciding what “good” looks like, you'll never be able to prove it worked. The outcomes you're chasing will shape how you match people and what you ask them at the end of the programme. If it's faster progression into management, that's a different programme design than if it's stronger retention in a specific cohort.

Surveys are treated as an afterthought. Feedback forms go out at the end of a programme, if at all. What gets captured is usually satisfaction, rather than impact. "Did you find this useful?" is not the same question as "Have you applied anything from this in your role, and what's changed as a result?"

Nobody owns the data. In many organisations, mentoring is sponsored by HR, coordinated by L&D, reported on by nobody, and lived by the participants. Without clear ownership of outcomes, the measurement never happens.

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How to start capturing the returns

Progress over perfection. A good starting point beats a perfect system that can’t yet be used.

The most effective place to begin is outcome definition. Before the programme launches, agree on what success looks like in concrete terms, and make sure those terms connect to something the business already cares about. Retention rates in a specific team. Time to promotion for a target cohort. If you can anchor mentoring to a metric someone senior already tracks, the case for investment writes itself.

From there, build simple tracking into the programme structure. Mid-programme check-ins that ask participants what they've applied, not just what they've discussed. End-of-programme reviews that capture specific examples of behaviour change or career progression, with a commitment to following up at six and twelve months to see what's actually stuck.

The goal is to move from anecdote to evidence. "Our mentoring programme is really valued" is a sentence. "Mentees in our last cohort were 40% less likely to leave in the following year" is a business case.

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The opportunity hiding in plain sight

Mentoring has an unusual quality among development activities. The value compounds. A mentor who develops a strong mentee this year might go on to become a mentor themselves, and tacit knowledge spreads through a network rather than disappearing when someone leaves. The culture of learning and investment that mentoring builds becomes self-reinforcing over time.

Most organisations are already running some form of mentoring. The work is building the infrastructure that makes what's already happening visible.

The returns are there. They're just waiting to be found.

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Ready to make your mentoring programme measurable? See how Thrive helps organisations track the development activity that matters most.

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