The Challenge
- Segment: Mid-size enterprise
- Industry: Property and casualty insurance
- Location: United States, with offices across the country
- Programs: Role-based mentoring for people new to their jobs, career mentoring
A U.S. property and casualty insurer with about 3,500 employees needed people to reach mentors beyond their own office, and to find guidance that fit their work. A new claims professional needs an experienced colleague who has done the same job. Someone exploring a career direction needs a relationship shaped around skills, competencies and goals. Mentoring had to serve both purposes, across locations.
The programs were growing. One went from roughly 35 pairs in one cycle to more than 60 in a later cycle. As more employees joined, preparing participants and understanding their scheduling needs mattered more.
The programs also ran on different rhythms. Role-based mentoring supports employees moving into claims and customer-facing roles, including new team managers, once their initial training ends. Several intakes a year start relationships of about six months with experienced colleagues in the same roles. Career mentoring serves broader development across the company, alongside a smaller, specialized track.
The talent development team's priorities were clear: close skill gaps, support a learning culture and build connections. Administrators needed resources for mentoring that happens virtually, and feedback that shows how each program is going.
Why Chronus
The insurer uses Chronus to connect people across locations and to shape mentoring around each program's purpose. For role-based mentoring, reaching experienced colleagues anywhere in the office network gives new employees guidance beyond the local mentor pool.
It's been nice with Chronus to be able to remove the physical barrier of needing mentors in a specific location.
Mentoring program administrator
Structure matters as much as access. Each program has its own connection plan and surveys. Administrators keep a human review of matches, applying what they know about roles, divisions and individual goals alongside matching recommendations.
The company already had an extensive learning library. Mentoring adds the person: profiles and connection plans help employees find someone suited to their development and keep the relationship moving.
The Solution
Role-based mentoring for people new to the job
For role-based mentoring, the administrator chose a connection plan with one section for each month of the relationship. Mentor and mentee can be in different offices, so much of the mentoring happens virtually.
Career mentoring built around skills
The team separated career mentoring from role-based mentoring while keeping ongoing relationships and their history intact. Profile questions, participant groups, communications and plans were all reviewed with Chronus. Working from Chronus templates, the career mentoring administrator added a survey to the connection plan.
We refined and built out the surveys in our connection plan this year, just from seeing the templates Chronus had.
Career mentoring program administrator
The program's focus has since sharpened around explicit skills and competencies, with profile questions that ask about each employee's goals and reasons for joining.
Simpler mentor re-enrollment
For a recent cycle, the team enrolled recertified returning mentors with a bulk upload that also filled in a profile field for each of them. Both administrators found the process easy once they had applied guidance from an earlier session.
The Impact
The insurer's reporting shows participants staying and staying engaged:
- 94% retention among more than 500 people enrolled across its mentoring programs, against 89% across the wider workforce
- 95% of career mentoring connections recorded activity over a recent two-month stretch
- 85% of role-based mentoring participants engaged with the program over the past year
- Every one of more than 50 meeting-feedback responses in an early career mentoring review rated the meeting helpful
Activity starts early. Soon after a new career mentoring cycle began, more than eight in ten people in connections had recorded activity, including more than 130 messages, more than 300 completed connection plan tasks and more than 60 booked meetings. By a later review, administrators had more than 100 meeting-feedback responses and nearly 60 completed mentor surveys to learn from.
In the role-based program's survey, every respondent said they would recommend the program, and 96% were satisfied with the program and their mentoring partner.
Employees can now find a mentor well beyond their own office, and each program keeps the structure and feedback that suit its purpose.
