 Hello and welcome to today's webinar, How to Make Virtual Mentoring Work. My name is Sarah, I'm from Redback Conference Inn and I will be your facilitator for today's session. So let's get started. I would like to welcome our presenters for today. We have with us Alex Richardson and Melissa Richardson from Horizons Unlimited. How are you both today? Well thanks Sarah. Excellent. Great to have you here with us today and to talk about virtual mentoring which is something that I think everyone is really excited to know more about. So I'd like to start with you Melissa. Firstly, can you give us a brief overview of what we will be exploring today within the webinar? Sure. So what we'll be looking at today is just some background. It's a short session. We'd love to share with you as much as we can about running virtual mentoring programs. We've been doing this now for some years and we know that they can be highly effective but with good design they can work without good design and planning they can fall very much on their face. So today we're going to cover some of the key design principles. So how to avoid some of the pitfalls that you can run into when there's no face to face. We'll talk a little bit about some of the new technologies which is really exciting. These technologies enable programs to run virtually and open it up to way more people than could have access before. And also we'll talk a little bit about one particular case study but we'll probably refer to a couple as we go. So let's talk about mentoring first up. So why would your organizations want to get involved in mentoring at all? And we know from the research there's many, many benefits that have been found in running mentoring programs. One is employee retention. People that are mentored tend to have much higher likelihood of staying in an organization where they have a mentor. They're more highly engaged. It can assist with helping employees be more mobile across different parts of an organization. It helps develop capability, particularly of mentors if they're getting good training. And it allows some of the intergenerational learning to happen. So we know that we have a very big baby boomer section of our workplace and this mentoring is a fantastic way to hand some of the learning on from one generation to another. How do you make mentoring work if you have a very highly dispersed workforce? And one thing we know is that people often, the ones that need it the most, often don't have access to good mentors. And we've very deliberately chosen this picture for this slide because this is an example of one of the programs that we've run, which I'll be talking about later, where women working on remote mining sites were not able to access good mentors. So how do you make it work? Let's talk a little bit though about virtual mentoring and what it is to start with. So you'll see if you look again in the research literature, it's given lots of different names from e-mentoring to distance mentoring, online. Really what we're talking about here is virtual mentoring is a mentoring relationship that transpires outside of the normal face-to-face using a range of communication modalities. So virtual mentoring is basically any kind of mentoring that happens when it's not face-to-face. Now again from the literature, what are the benefits? First of all, and some of this is from the research and some of it's from our own experience. So it makes sense that when you run mentoring online or virtually, it makes it accessible to people anywhere so they can be in any location but also any time. So if you have people working on complex rosters or different shifts with the use of email, it means people can actually talk to one another in any time zone. It also allows you to match people up across different geographies and different time zones. It's convenient. You don't have to go to a location to meet with your partner and it can be quick. So if you actually have a meeting, you tend to think, well, we've got to sit down and have at least an hour conversation but sometimes you don't need an hour. So mentoring can be quite quick. It can be a 20-minute phone call. We also know from the research that sometimes barriers like age or gender or social status get in the way of mentoring relationships. And one of the interesting findings is with virtual or online mentoring, those barriers have a diminished effect. So that's a good thing and it opens up the pool a little bit more. Online access to information and resources is what people want these days. They don't want to be sent paper information. They want to be able to download it easily online. We also know that communication media like email because it's asynchronous. It happens at different times. It allows both mentee and mentor a bit more time to think. So doing it this way widens the pool of who can participate. It also reduces costs because you're not having to maybe host people at events and provide them with catering or have room or venue costs. Some of the disadvantages are and we've discovered these ourselves in running different programs. It can be very hard to train some of the interpersonal skills that mentors and mentees need online. And that's why we've moved from doing training by webinar to what we think is better quality, which is e-learning. And I'll talk a little bit about that later. One of the things we know is that working via Skype or telephone or email, people may find it harder to build the relationship. So there's a bit more work required of both the mentor and the mentee in order to build that up and get that rapport happening at the beginning. Another point is mentors actually perform a large number of roles within a mentoring relationship and it's very difficult for a mentor to be actually able to role model behavior or ways of being or doing with their mentees if they're not face to face. And another technique that's used when you can meet is shadowing. So being able to follow the mentor around and actually see what they're doing, that's very difficult to do. Another potential disadvantage is there may be generational differences in comfort with technology. I think from our experience, it's not just generational differences actually. We find different people have different levels of comfort. And so if you want to generalize, the younger generation seem to be more comfortable with virtual relationships than maybe some of the older generations. One thing also to take account of is the accessibility of your participants and the quality of the connection. If they don't have good broadband, then it can be difficult to connect with people by webinar or web conference. And certainly if you're rolling out online training, it's difficult if they can't get online. And another potential disadvantage is reduced commitment and persistence. So it would appear that it's a little bit easier to walk away from an online relationship or a virtual relationship than it is from a face to face one. And so people may drop out a little bit more readily and that's something you need to take account of. So that's a bit of an overview of virtual mentoring and some of the potential advantages and disadvantages. Thanks so much for that, Melissa. And we can see Sam as well. They actually do have at Enterprising Partnerships a mentoring program and it's not within the organization, but they provide it for participants in their IGEN, which is an innovation generation program. So great to see that some people out there are already taking part in these programs. Now, Alex, I just want to hand over to you now because we've discussed the advantages, disadvantages, and why virtual mentoring does work. In terms of technologies which we've touched on, what sort of technologies do you need to enable a virtual mentoring program? Because obviously we need something to communicate with people, don't we? That's correct, Sarah. Thank you. I'd like to start off by saying Melissa touched on it herself, but the invent of Skype and phone calls and FaceTime, email, SMS, Internet and so on has made it very accessible for people to actually connect from distances. So the ability for people to connect interstate or even across borders into different countries is amazing and that has really allowed virtual mentoring to take shape and to start to become accessible to organizations into different programs that are being run. So I'll first touch on some web conferencing tools. So in our programs, we tend to run three events during the actual program. So we run a program intro, we run a mid-program review, and we run a program close, and the point of those are to have some high-touch points with the participants of the mentoring program. Now, if you were to be a localized mentoring program, you could run those as local events, however it's becoming more and more necessary as people start to expand their mentoring programs to a virtual mentoring program to run those via web conferencing tools, for example, like what we're using today with Redback. The big benefits of running them via web conferencing is obviously the dispersed geography of them. It's also the ability to record the actual webinar itself. And the big benefit to that is we're actually able to send the program intro, the mid-program review, or the close to the participants at a later date, and they can actually attend that without having been there on the day. The huge benefit of that is if somebody's not available to come, there might be family emergencies or work emergencies. They are able to actually not attend and then come back later. The other benefit of web conferencing tools are basic polling. So what we often use it, for example, in the program intro, if the program's already run out prior to the program intro, we'll actually ask people, have you met with your mentee or have you met with your mentor? Have you started to develop that relationship and how's it going? The mid-program review is great for that. And then getting feedback about the actual relationship and the span of the relationship at the program close as well is a great option. And web conferencing gives you that power. The other thing is we tend to segment those events. So we segment those events for either mentors or mentees. And the beauty of that is the web conferencing allows for that very cleanly. You're able to get the mentors in one place and the mentees in one place. And they're able to actually interact via the web conferencing tools. So the chat boxes that you guys are using today, or we're able to open up to the floor. And people are actually able to give feedback from one mentor to another mentor on a specific issue they might be facing. So they might say, look, I'm finding it really difficult to engage with my mentee. I'm really finding it difficult to start the actual relationship. And that might be in the program intro. And then another mentor will say, well, hey, guess what? I tried this. And that really worked for me. And that's a really good feedback loop there. So yes, some points that are on the slide is it helps you run the program events for geographically dispersed audience, as we mentioned, the real-time feedback or polling, and then the peer collaboration, as we mentioned. So the other thing I'd like to touch on today is online training. So there's a few different options of online training. And when we talk about training, we're talking about training your mentors and mentees on how to be in a mentoring relationship. Now, we've done some research with Professor David Clutterbuck, one of our colleagues in the UK. And we've found that one in three mentoring relationships will succeed when you don't train either the mentor or the mentee, which we perceive to be an unacceptable rate. If you train the mentor alone, you actually get two in three success rate. And then if you train both the mentor and the mentee, you get above 90% success rate generally. So the few options that we have for online training in order to deliver it is you can engage an external trainer. And that's when web conferencing comes into play. We can get that with an experienced trainer you can hire on board and get them to run your web conferencing. They then can run your program intro, your program review, your clothes. But they can also help you run specific training sessions on how to be a good mentor, how to listen, how to question, how to challenge, how to do some of these soft skills that a mentor should be really good at. Outlining the differences, for example, as well is great for you're not a coach. You're a mentor. You should be listening. You should be giving feedback and so on. The second point that's up there is our online training that we've developed. And there's a few options out there. We'd like to think that ours is at the forefront of quality, which is online training, e-learning training. And we've developed a course around, it's got 26 videos in it for the mentor version, for example. And it basically runs you through the beginning of how can you actually engage in a relationship, how do you set goals, how do you prepare yourself for the meetings. It's got a whole lot of interactive PDFs. And basically the big benefit of online training from that point of view, from e-learning point of view, is it's accessible at any time. It means that the mentor or the mentee can really take their time to take the course. They can go away. They can come back and re-engage at any point in time. And the third option that I'd like to point out is also e-books and guides. So I mentioned earlier Professor David Clutterbuck. But there are many e-books and e-guides out there on how to be a good mentor or how to be a good mentee. And those are readily accessible across the web. So the big benefits of online training are obviously the geographic spread. You're able to engage a lot of your mentors and mentees, even if they're not in the one location. Time constraints. So if your mentors and mentees aren't able to make a web conference or a specific event, you can actually have them do the online training at any point in time. E-books or guides or whatever it is. Budget restrictions. You're able to actually cut your costs because you're not needing large venues. You're not needing catering and all of that kind of stuff. You're literally just giving them the online training. Engaging content. This is a big one, I believe. If you've got some really good engaging content, you can really get the point across on how to be a great mentor or how to be a great mentee. And you can properly support your mentors and mentees through that experience. Data access is another big one. So you can include your actual online training within the participant's CPD or employee skills for further engagement and further, I suppose, moving forward within the organization and moving up the ranks, I guess. So moving on to the next thing I'd like to talk about is online administration platforms. So I suppose the first thing I should talk about is what are they and what are the benefits of them? So an online administration platform is supposed to take a lot of the work that you would be doing in the admin and automate a lot of that. So stuff like application forms, stuff like surveying your participants, stuff like regular connection communications, so on. There is an event on this day, or don't forget to do your goal setting with your mentor or your mentee. And the big benefits of an online admin platform is it can seriously cut down the time it takes to run a mentoring program. We find that they're very useful and they're very effective as well. You're able to mine a lot of data, so you're able to find out how often your mentor or your mentee are connecting, are they doing their online training, are they engaging on surveys, are they having any problems in their mentoring relationship? You can gauge that early and make sure that you get on top of it, make a phone call and say, hey, what's going on? How can we support you? How can we help you? So the choices of what you're going to use, and we've got a couple of examples up on the slide. There's Cronus, there's Mutual Force, there's Mentor Loop, which is a Melbourne-based company. There's Coaching Cloud in the UK. Now the choice depends on what you need to do and the program design itself. The costs range anywhere from $5,000 to well over $30,000 depending on how you're using it and what you're using it for, and the key benefits are the online applications, the automated matching. That's one I didn't mention. You've got a lot of bulk matching and algorithms that you can have within these platforms to help you match and make the matching process a lot easier for you, automated emails and communications, and then the resources access, so the ability to give them their guides and their online training. So that wraps up the technology side of things for mentoring and how to run it in a virtual mentoring program. Great, thank you. Now we have a few questions coming through and some of them I'll get to at the end because I really want to get into this next part. But just on this slide here, Alex, have you looked at Civic Core or Mental Core? Have you heard of Mental Track in Australia? Any of those? Yes, so we're actually talking with Mental Core at the moment. We like to collaborate with as many of these online admin platforms as possible. Mental Core is great. They've got a real focus up until this point on, I suppose, youth mentoring. They really focus on the educational side of organizations, but they're quickly moving into the corporate fields and the association or membership organization fields as well. So yeah, Mental Core is definitely a viable option. As far as I understand at the moment, they don't have automated matching inside their platform, but that's on the cards in the future soon. I see also Sam as mentioned, Mental Track is also in Australia and I've actually, I've never heard of them. I'll have to go and look them up. Thanks for pointing that out, Sam. All learning today. Yeah, that's right. There are so many different technologies that are emerging in all fields, but especially in the mentoring field, it's something that's growing. And we believe it's a really important thing for the future, especially the virtual mentoring, I suppose, structure. And these online admin platforms play a big part in that. Now we've gone through this, and this is all fantastic, but let's get some stories from people who have done it before and we've seen work. So I believe we're going to delve into a case study now. Is that correct, Melissa? It is. We're going to talk about a program, and I mentioned before, that one of, I think, the best case studies, and in fact, Australia has actually showcased this at a global women's summit just in May as Australia's best example of running programs like this. So this is a program rolled out by the Australian Women and Resources Alliance, which is part of AMA, an association for companies in the mining and metal sector, so in the resource industry. So at that point, when we got involved, the organisation was looking to roll out a nine-month program for women in remote locations. It had to be virtual because people were too far away to come into a city location. Since the first rollout, we've actually rolled out 15 cohorts and over 200 people participating from all parts of Australia and even beyond Australia. The program admin we used was the Cronus platform. We were already familiar with that platform, but our client had decided to use it after a bit of a search and looking at which one would work for them. Initially, we did the training by webinar. We weren't very happy with how that was going, and so we switched over last year to our online training. The pairs we know because we've surveyed them and we've asked how are they connecting, mostly they're connecting by phone or by Skype or by email, and actually most of them are using a combination of those things. So the way it works is people apply, they have their applications, they can actually go on to the Cronus platform, they upload their profile, they are then matched by the program administration, put into a cohort according to when they can participate and whether there's an appropriate match for them because one thing we're really interested in is we really make a great deal of emphasis about is you don't match people for the sake of having a match, you have to be careful that they are going to be suitable mentoring partners for one another. And then we have a progress review by webinar as well, so halfway through at about four months, we get people back online participating, we do a mentee group and a mentor group. So the mentees can talk about how they're going with their mentors, are they having troubles with goal setting, which is typically a problem that mentees struggle with, they put themselves in a program and they're not quite sure what to focus on with the help of their mentor. And with the mentors, we can troubleshoot, so it gives us an opportunity to deal with any particular issues that come up for the mentors, anything they're struggling with their mentees. So if we look at the results, we track at two points, at the halfway, well there's three points now actually, at the halfway point we do a survey at the end and now we're actually going back to the participants one year on, which is really interesting, so we have a bit of a longitudinal study going on now. So these are some of the results, 87% of the mentees said they'd achieved the goals they set for themselves. I think this is really good, almost a third rated the mentoring experience is one of the best things I've done, I think it was another nearly two thirds rated it as quite a good experience. So we're getting a very, very high satisfaction rate and certainly as high as you would expect with a face to face program. So I think this is a great demonstration that virtual programs can actually be very, very effective. We've just got our first round of research back from people who participated a year and a half ago. 83% of the people who responded to the survey were still in contact with their mentors. So again, that's very much in line with the kind of results that we would expect. So some of the changes that we made along the way were dealing with one of the issues that came up after about the first year, we did a big review and looked at how could we change things and improve things. We weren't happy with the dropout rate, we had about 30% of them and was the mentees that were dropping out, not the mentors. And we wanted to address that and so a couple of changes that we made seem to have done that. So we've really halved that dropout rate which is fantastic and now that's a kind of acceptable level. One thing that was added was a pre-matching video. So they actually made it compulsory for people who were going to apply as mentees to actually watch quite a short video, I think it's about 15, 20 minutes. And it really does set expectations for people that are going to participate. So before they even apply and get matched, they know that they're committed and that they're going to go the distance. So I think that's made a big difference. I actually also think that a better quality of training has contributed to that. So that's one case study. I think it's a great example. Together with Amma, with our client, we've been able to make some changes, do some learning and I think we've got pretty much a best practice model worked out there now. One of the things I'd also like to mention about that program is because they're running some virtual mentoring programs and they've got quite a large span across audience of participants. They're able to look into things like government funding and sponsorships in order to help them run their virtual mentoring programs and to fund their mentoring programs. Often membership organizations have got an audience of participants that are relevant to sponsorship or government funding models. And in fact, I can see we've got Gina Mabwish who's on the line. She was actually the client that we worked with at Amma right at the beginning. If you wanna know how to get government funding, Gina's the woman for you. Being in contact with her, she's awesome. She knows how to do that. And in fact, this is now funded for the next two years. So the government's been pretty happy with the results obviously. They keep putting money into it. Gina's saying ha ha, but anyway. Some great results there. Thank you and thank you Gina for your comments as well. So you mentioned the drop-off rate as being one of the issues that you experienced and had to change in this case, in particular. What other obstacles may co-ordinators come up against when designing or running a program? What should we be wearing? Look, I'm gonna cover first the pitfalls in any mentoring program and then really talk about what's particular for a virtual program. We find, these are the most common. So insufficient planning and preparation. A lot of people think mentoring is easy. Well actually it is easy if you know what you're doing. And provided you do some planning and preparation, hopefully you'll get a good program design. Don't underestimate how long it is. So some people, to prepare, some people say we wanna launch it next month. Well actually that's completely unrealistic. The next issue is poor selection and matching. So as I said, people can put themselves in a program, not quite sure, be sure how they get there. And so they're not the right people. So the more you can communicate to people about who should be in this kind of program, what's the typical profile of a mentee for whom this program would be effective. And then the matching is very critical as well. So if you're using an online platform which has some kind of automated matching, ask carefully how their matching algorithm works because again with the case study I mentioned before, that was another thing we had to fine tune as we went. We had to change some of the matching algorithm. Another issue is leaving mentors on the bench for too long. If you send out a call for mentors but you don't match them for several months, they lose interest and they go away. Not defining adequately the roles and boundaries for both the mentor and the mentee is a critical issue. Not having people be in the program as volunteers is also a critical issue. People, it's no good mandating people into mentoring. The relationships really don't flourish. Underinvestment is a big issue. And particularly in having a dedicated program manager and adequate education for stakeholders. Now when I say a dedicated program manager, it doesn't have to be a full-time job for somebody, but it can be maybe a quarter or a third of someone's job. And so somebody needs to put the time and resources in. Another issue is raising false expectations. So particularly in in-company programs, people think, oh, if I go in this mentoring program, maybe I'll get promoted. So you have to be sure that people have realistic expectations. And you need to also make sure that the context for mentoring is certain and that everybody understands what the outcomes are going to be and how they're going to be measured. So that's really what's relevant for any kind of mentoring. The next slide is really about, so what's different about the virtual mentoring? We actually think that the program admin requirement is actually much higher with a virtual program. We think you need greater structure when there's very little or no face-to-face interaction. And I mean, not just little face-to-face between the mentor and the mentee, but not much opportunity for the program administrators to actually meet with people and talk directly. You need more follow-up, otherwise you just have to accept you'll have a high dropout rate. And you need to communicate often. So again, we've gone to the research on running virtual teams. And we know that with virtual teams, there's a requirement to communicate more often than with face-to-face teams. So that seems relevant to us. So when I say more often, at least every couple of weeks, I've talked about the online matching algorithm, so I won't cover that again. Obviously we think if you can have good online training that people can complete in their own time, that's the best. If you can give people access to demonstrations, show people how to do a mentoring conversation, have interviews with people who've participated, people really learn by seeing how it's done, give them lots of how-to documents, but mostly we're finding people want to watch videos and not actually read documents. That seems to be the trend. So those would be our top tips. Great. And obviously with anything new that comes out, people are always looking to self-serve. Now, I know there are a few self-serving platforms emerging at the moment. Can you talk a little bit about the advantages and the disadvantages of this style of setup just to give people an overview? Sure, let's talk about self-serve. So self-serve is really emerging and I might relate it to peer mentoring, for example. Now, peer mentoring up until this point has been a very ad hoc and often can be a lot like speed dating. You put a whole bunch of mentors and mentees into a room and you give them five minutes until the bell rings and then they have to move on and talk to the next mentor and develop meaningful relationships in five minutes. Now, in our experience, that kind of mentoring doesn't work, but what does work and what the future really can start to look like is mentoring and mentors being available when specific people need them. So platforms such as Cronus and there's a few other platforms which we can share with you at a later date. We're often sending stuff out in our newsletters as well so definitely sign up to that if you want to learn a bit more. But a lot of these platforms are starting to tackle that issue and tackle that idea. The idea of being able to reach out to a mentor when you need it. The idea of being able to say, I really need a mentor or someone to see me through this specific technical issue or this specific leadership problem and so on. I want to self-serve myself. Now, on top of that as well, people are able to build long-term relationships out of those mentoring self-serve programs and self-serve platforms. There's no reason why they can't connect with somebody, find that they click with their mentor and then continue on with the relationship down the track. So I'll talk a bit about the advantages of running a self-serve program. And we're more talking about a structured virtual program today so I'll keep it quick. The advantages are it can be cheap to run or cheaper to run depending on the amount of participants that you have or the amount of people within your organization that you've got. The mentee empowerment and choice of the mentor is definitely an advantage. They're able to go in and feel like they're really choosing their mentor and connecting with them purposefully. It's good for knowledge transfer so the ability to look for a specific technique or a specific soft skill that you need to learn quickly and for you to reach out and grab it quickly and short-term need as well is the same thing. Disadvantages, there may not be suitable for longer relationship-based mentoring which we really believe is a really big advantage to these long-term virtual programs and often we would suggest that you run a self-serve concurrently with a virtual mentoring program and the big benefit of that is you build relationships and the style of communication with your mentor changes over that time. So it goes from the basic goal setting into more deeper thinking about your career and the future of things. Most often do not get traction. It depends on the way that it's set up and the actual culture of the organization itself but that's generally true. And then rely on participants accessing resources that they need, how to choose a mentor and how to get the most from the relationship. So if it's self-service, it's often just in time stuff that often they're not feeling like they need as much training or they don't engage as much in the content of how to be in a good mentoring relationship. So self-service often has a higher dropout rate or a lesser success rate. Great. Now we're going to go into some questions now because there have been some great ones that have come through and I've also just launched a survey because we'd love to hear your feedback on today's event and also just let us know if you want to find out some more information from both Melissa and Alex and we can go from there. But first of all for Marrakaya, so at what point participant number wise do you think that the investment in online platform actually pays for itself? Hi Marrakay. So the point at which an online platform really pays for itself depends on I suppose the size of the mentoring program that you're running, how many participants you have, but it also depends on how much administration time you're pouring into it. The main benefit of an online platform is to save you time and therefore money in the long run. Now these platforms can often be quite expensive but if you roll out in the right way and you have your communications dealt with and the surveys dealt with and you're running it and you're learning how the admin platform can actually save you time, it can save you money at the end of the day as well. And we've had experience of people running 20 pairs and saving money on that themselves. We've had experience of people running 50 or 100 pairs and that having the same effect. Yeah, if I can just add, I think once you get over about 25 pairs so you're dealing with 50 people and more, matching by hand becomes incredibly laborious. So if you're using a platform that can assist with the first cut matching, so it gives you, you put in the criteria that you wanna match on, it gives you a first cut of suggestions. It's way quicker. So we're working for example with the Law Society of New South Wales at the moment. They run a program for young lawyers which has 100 pairs, we're just launching it at the moment on the Cronus platform. They were doing this by hand for the last several years and it was taking them days and spreadsheets, pasted it around every wall of a room. I think they've got it down to about six hours, Alex. Is that what, yeah. So I think over 25 pairs, matching by hand can get pretty onerous. Great. And another question, while we're just doing these questions, I've just brought up another slide as well which is there's a link there to the e-guide which is from you guys. Do you just wanna explain that a little bit? What that about? Yeah, so that's a really quick guide, you know, a quick five minute read on mentoring program design and some best practices in there. If you go to that link, it asks you to fill out a form. That also puts you into our newsletter as well. So you'll receive some of our research. We only send out newsletters about once a month so it won't clutter your inbox, I promise. Great. And Amelia asks, she's also asked, so Melissa, you briefly explained when we're going through the pitfalls about, you mentioned to communicate often but not more than once per month. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, so I think the best is every couple of weeks that the participants in a virtual program receive some kind of communication. Usually it's just an email. It might be a little tip for mentors. Some of the things we send out are things like using storytelling and anecdotes. Or it might be a little reminder, by now you should have set your goals or have you done your online training. So that's what I mean by some touch points. I think if it goes for more than a month, you just need to help the pairs keep their momentum going. So again, another question people ask is how often should a mentor and mentee meet? Which is probably anywhere between every two weeks and four weeks. So it kind of fits in with that cycle. If you're pestering them a couple of times a week, then they're just going to get annoyed. Yeah. The other thing is that the resources can slip through the cracks. So if you're overcluttering their inbox, often the online training will slip through the cracks and you'll have to follow up. Or the mentoring agreement, for example, will slip through the cracks. It's important for those resources to really hit home and do the job that they're meant to do. Great. And Janet has asked, so from your experience, are some mentors also sourced from outside a company? So perhaps within the same industry? Is that quite common? I think that's a great question. I haven't actually seen, and Melissa might be able to expand on that, that actually happening, but I'd say it would be very possible for you to reach out, for example, to industry associations and say, hey, we're looking for mentors. Do you have any people that you can suggest to mentor our people from external companies? Often that can be a great thing because there's the issue of mentoring within a company and I suppose the confidentiality side of things and the idea of what will the actual manager say and will that have any effect on their employment in the future? So often sourcing from outside a company can be great. Yeah, this is really the role for professional and industry associations. So I think the question may be referred to the Aura program. They were people matched up with people from other companies and I think what was great in that, we had people from BHP matched up with people from Rio Tinto. I'm just using that as an example. So people are often able to overcome some of the issues that you might have with having a conversation with a competitor because it's really about the individual in their career, not about the company and confidentiality when you're doing intercompany mentoring is really important. Excellent. So we're just towards the end now but anyone can contact the both of you if they have any questions after this event. Great and we'll provide some of the, all of the contact details for Alex and Melissa in the follow-up email along with the recording. Now just put the slide up here on key messages. So I hand it over to you both to wrap it up and just explain the key messages and what people should really take away from today's session. Yeah, look, I mean there's so many principles but I suppose the key one is plan, plan, plan. Before you even start, really think through what is our program purpose? How are we going to do this? Give yourself a good amount of time to plan for it. Make sure you have the right level of structure and support, too much structure and people can feel constrained but not enough structure, your program just will fall over. That's often when people call us in, when they've got it wrong and they need some help. Don't under-invest. If you're running an association program, go look for sponsors or government funding. If you're doing this in a company, make sure you've got some champions within your organization to put some money into this. And virtual programs do need love. You can't just launch a program online and then not nurture it and love it. You still need to kind of nurture it along. So those would be our key messages we'd like to leave you with today. Yeah, I guess connect with us. Feel free to reach out at any point and it looks like you're all connecting with each other on the chat box as well which is great to see. But yeah, feel free to reach out. Even, we're always here to talk about mentoring and we love mentoring. That's what we do first and foremost. So we love to hear about anything that you guys are up to and if there's any way in which we can help, we're always a funk all the way to have a listen and to give some feedback. Thank you. And thank you everyone for joining today. It's been a very, very inspiring session and I hope you've all taken a few things on board that you can take on and maybe transfer throughout your entire organization. So on behalf of Redback, a huge thank you to both Melissa and Alex. You've been amazing presenters today and like I said, keep a lookout for that recording which should arrive in your inboxes within the next 48 hours. Enjoy the rest of your Tuesday and we hope to see you at future Redback events. Thanks everyone. Bye for now.