Creating New Pathways For Employees Through Mentorship

The Challenge

Mentorship can do more than boost skills advancement and support individual career growth. As Amazon’s mentoring strategy demonstrates, these initiatives can elevate an employer’s brand, provide opportunities to learn more about employee challenges and build a management pipeline that ensures innovative voices are heard.

Amazon launched the Amazon Mentoring Program (AMP) in partnership with Chronus in 2016. The program provides a personalized platform for matching mentors and mentees across a variety of mentoring programs with the flexibility to adapt to new priorities and objectives as they arise. The program has grown 750% since its first year. What started with 18,800 users now supports 160,000 employees, including nearly 50,000 who identify with one or more affinity groups—a group of employees linked by a common interest, background, demographic or goal.

In the last year, Chronus enabled the Amazon mentoring team to scale up AMP to help leaders create a more productive, more diverse and more just work environment.

Mentoring provides a safe space, empowers employees to take ownership of their growth and development, and enables leaders to show up authentically.
– Melony Menard, Senior Program Manager

“Mentoring provides a safe space, empowers employees to take ownership of their growth and development, and enables leaders to show up authentically,” said Melony Menard, senior program manager at Amazon Mentoring. “Both mentors and mentees share their successes and their challenges to pay it forward for the next generation.”

Objective

At its core, Amazon has long understood the link between culture and employee connection in the workplace. Amazon turned to mentoring as a formal practice in order to drive connection and propel development for a more productive and engaged workforce. To do this effectively, the Amazon team built their mentoring strategy on four distinct pillars:

Community Building

Create a safe space for authentic relationship-building across the organization. Mentors play a critical role in developing the community due to the size of the company and the rise of remote work.

Professional Growth

Drive ownership of career development. Mentors benefit by developing their leadership skills (e.g. actively listening, providing actionable feedback and leading with empathy). Mentees benefit through exposure to new ways of thinking while getting real-time feedback and support.

Inclusion & Belonging

Provide a valuable opportunity for seeking out diverse perspectives, gaining new or different ways of thinking and broadening perspectives.

Manager Development

Help new and existing managers leverage mentoring as a continuous professional development tool.

The Amazon Mentoring Program launched its first program, a one-to-one Amazon career mentoring, with a focus on self-directed matching. Beyond this, AMP introduced boutique mentoring tracks that allowed affinity groups and business units to customize their own mentoring solutions for their greatest needs.

Mentoring raises Amazon’s collective performance bar and enhances our ability to deliver for both internal and external customers.
– Melony Menard, Senior Program Manager

Types of Amazon Mentoring Programs

Since then, Amazon’s mentoring strategy has evolved into more than 100 individual programs, targeting everything from high-potential employees and leadership development to mentoring circles for affinity groups across intersections, including women, black employees, military employees and beyond. Here are just a few of their existing programs:

• New-to-Amazon Manager Circles: Provides the support needed to develop the foundational skills to be an effective manager at Amazon. The programs are designed to help new and first- time people managers (less than 6 months) onboard to their new leadership role by learning from both peer managers and managers.
• Amazon Matchup: Amazon’s peer-to-peer mentoring program, offering Amazonians the opportunity to learn from their peers whilst building mentoring and coaching skills.
• Military Mentoring Program (MMP): A career development resource specific to Veterans, connecting new Amazonians with experienced employees outside of their site who can help translate their military background to Amazon’s peculiar culture.
• BENchmark: The Black Employee Network global mentorship program (BENchmark) sets the standard for professional development by prioritizing the needs and goals of the Amazon Black community via mentorship circles.
• Limitless Mentoring Program: A 6-month mentorship program designed to provide mid-level leaders with opportunities to connect with leadership across all Amazon organizations to drive rich learning, elevate leadership capabilities and advance
  forward-thinking development.

My mentor and I had several sessions where we discussed my day- to-day role, assessed my broader career trajectory, and identified areas I could work on to eventually move into a technical role. Not only was my mentor a significant influence in helping me get promoted, but in July 2022, I started a technical role as a Senior Solutions Architect, in which I’m learning a huge amount.
– Mentee

The Solution

To support its goal of providing employees with more opportunities to learn from and engage with peers, Amazon’s mentoring strategy focused on helping employees take ownership of their growth and development. The Chronus platform helped create highly compatible mentoring pairs and provide program admins deep analytical insight into program performance and organizational outcomes.

Personalized Matching Criteria

Chronus enabled Amazon to personalize their matching algorithm to better support growth, skills building and cross-organizational understanding.

“The ability to create a custom algorithm that enables better aligned mentoring connections not only ensures scalability but creates a better customer experience,” said Menard.

As the mentoring strategy at Amazon evolved, the program added admin matching and hybrid matching styles, alongside their self matching capability. With the addition of hybrid matching, mentees had autonomy in choosing whether to self-select mentors or lean on program admins for matching support, resulting in a program that was more customizable to participant preferences. These types of decisions align matches based on what’s most important to the employee, such as career level, job title, area of expertise or location. Menard noted this is the foundation of the program—matching two people who are a good fit but otherwise wouldn’t connect.

Personalized Experience, At Scale

Chronus enables organizations to launch multiple tracks under one program. Amazon used this flexibility to launch boutique tracks, enabling Amazon to meet the needs of more employee groups.

Going from one to more than 100 mentoring programs doesn’t happen overnight. Having the ability to set up new programs with their own admins, under one global governance system was a vital part of scaling AMP to what it is today. In addition, being able to change the format of mentoring provided based on each program’s need and audience allowed Amazon to better meet the needs of employee groups, based on what they wanted most from their development and connection.

Reporting & Data Visualizations

The platform’s ability to showcase program performance from a global level, while also being able to dissect individual program performance makes it easy to see what’s working and what’s not. With clear dashboards and reporting, the Amazon mentoring team is able to build on program successes.

“Sometimes we’re so knee-deep in the work,” said Carla Love, Program Manager at Amazon Mentoring. “To be able to step back and look at the growth from a visual perspective has been not only invigorating but also rewarding.”

It didn’t seem like an obvious match as my mentor is a very senior executive with brilliant technical knowledge, while I was just starting out in AWS. But he has proven to be the mentor I never knew I needed. He has allowed me to look at the business through his lens and pushed me to get out of my comfort zone. My mentor has been my ally, guided me in my decisions and held me accountable throughout.
– Mentee

The Impact

Understanding the participant or the customer experience is the cornerstone of every great mentoring program. In order to understand mentoring’s true impact, Amazon looks at the following metrics:

• Employee sentiment
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Is this program best serving its core audience?
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Would users recommend the program?
• Month-over-month program growth
• Month-over-month increase in total connected users
• Low ignore rates: Do mentees who send requests receive a response (either accept or decline)?

From inception to now, the Amazon Mentoring Program has seen exponential growth across nearly every metric.

Chronus really allows us to create a
custom, inclusive and structured environment for employees.
– Melony Menard, Senior Program Manager

Why Global Organizations Choose Chronus

Leading enterprises turn to Chronus for its powerful, scalable platform to address key workplace challenges like disengagement, turnover and disconnected teams, especially in remote and hybrid environments. Chronus mentoring software enables organizations to leverage mentoring and employee communities to create meaningful connections, enhance engagement and promote continuous learning.

With its simplicity, strong security protocols and proven scalability, Chronus helps companies efficiently manage and grow programs that drive retention, productivity and collaboration. Trusted by brands like Amazon, LVMH, ExxonMobil, T-Mobile, Harvard University and Paychex, Chronus breaks down silos and builds a culture of development and connection, ensuring employees are engaged and supported. For organizations looking to nurture talent and stay competitive, Chronus is the solution.