A mentoring initiative is a business strategy that enables organizations to turn people into assets. Since every core business process and strategic initiative requires a Human Capital Management business strategy to execute it, improvements made in HCM systems and processes can notably impact an organization's bottom line. A mentoring program is a standard of excellence that health care organizations must attain to consistently provide the highest quality of care. The mentors', mentees' (those who are mentored), and organization's goals work in tandem towards the ultimate goal of improving patient care.



In healthcare organizations, financial, physical and human resources are limited nevertheless showcasing the value of mentoring is essential with cost-effective practical automation and scaleable templates to capture, process and report quantifiable evidence of quality, effectiveness, impact, results and value. Quantifying mentoring's impact on human capital investments and business results directly showcases the value that it delivers to all stakeholders and offers immediate and quantifiable savings in time, energy and money.

What is Mentoring? Mentoring, both a noun and a verb, is a helping relationship usually between a more experienced mentor and a less experienced mentee (or prot'g?). It's a mentee-driven agenda in which a mentor, who is a trusted confidant and guide, is non-judgmental but challenging. The goal is to help the mentee to develop to his or her full potential both personally and professionally. The mentee gets a tested, experienced view of his or her industry. This advice is invaluable as the mentee makes career decisions and plans a successful career path.

What is eMentoring? eMentoring is a personalized, on-demand collaborative mentoring experience that uses web-enabled technology and integrated knowledge sharing and management to quickly build knowledge, skills, and capability to optimize human performance, anytime, anywhere, while providing the ability to track and measure results. Most often, even with its efficiencies, eMentoring is

also more cost effective.

Why eMentoring? Healthcare organizations are under extreme pressure to accelerate the development of new capabilities and reduce training costs. eMentoring enables organizations to more effectively manage and exchange company knowledge helping to create competitive differentiation.

Assess your organization's current Human Capital Management business strategies. Do you have a formal mentoring program in place? If not, then your organization may want to consider this competitive strategy to increase revenue, decrease expenses, and eliminate regulatory consequences.

As health care organizations compete to attract and retain a high-caliber workforce, they will need to focus on providing quality practice environments. Mentoring programs and other models for integrating work and learning are exciting avenues for stimulating professional growth, career development, staff morale and quality of care within the workplaces. Advance Mentoring Healthcare encourages decision-makers, healthcare staff, educators, managers, and other stakeholders at all levels to use this article as a foundation for encouraging programs to help define and achieve their goals. The benefits and outcomes of these programs are valuable and hold great promise for circumventing the looming healthcare crisis and nursing shortage.