Using SAP SuccessFactors Mentoring

Mentoring is partnering with a more experienced colleague to enhance knowledge, skills, and self-awareness in a certain area.

The mentor supports the employee by giving advice based on their own experiences or other structured ways to transfer knowledge.

Through Career Development Planning, you can formalize your mentoring process by using the program wizard to identify details, determine mentor and mentee groups, and set timelines for each individual program. Mentoring supports the creation and administration of mentoring programs, with automated recommendations and matching.

Most organizations have mentoring programs but no integrated way to administer them. Without an automated process, hours of work are required to match mentors and mentees by hand or import data and configure niche solutions. Setting up mentoring programs is easy with SAP Success Factors Mentoring, and the Mentoring solution is integrated with the entire SAP SuccessFactors suite.

There are two ways to activate Mentoring:

1. Turn Mentoring on via the Upgrade Center in the Admin Center.
2. Enable the Mentoring feature in Provisioning.

   Although mentoring can be enabled via a provisioning switch in Company Settings, the best practice is to utilize the Upgrade Center when possible.

The following lessons provide the actions necessary to activate Mentoring in your instance and give you the ability as an Administrator to modify the configuration options.

Keep in mind that Mentoring requires Role-Based Permissions, and different roles will often have different permissions. For example, an Administrator role with all permissions will have broader access than an Employee role with more restrictive access.

To use the Upgrade Center, complete the following steps:

1. Log into your instance.
2. Navigate to the Admin Center.
3. Select Upgrade Center.
4. Select Mentoring.
5. Choose Upgrade Now.

If your upgrade is successful, you should see the message illustrated in the figure.

The next steps after the Upgrade Center are as follows:

1. Log back into your instance.
2. Navigate to the Admin Center.
3. Select the Upgrade Center and then View recently completed upgrades.
4. Navigate to Mentoring and choose View Next Steps.

Next, there are two important steps to move forward with Mentoring.

Give yourself the proper permissions to view the Mentoring options and begin the setup.

1. Navigate to Manage Permissions Roles using action search.
2. Select the role for which you’re editing permissions.
3. Choose Edit and change the basic information if necessary.
4. Choose Next and navigate to the Administrator Permissions section.
5. Select Manage Career Development.
6. Grant Manage Mentoring Programs permission to the selected role.
   • The Manage Administrator Permissions for Programs permission should be enabled if you wish to roles to specify which users are authorized to manage specific mentoring programs.
7. Choose Next, review the role’s permissions, and choose Save.

Under the Administrator Permissions section select the following:

• Manage Career Development → Manage Mentoring Programs

• Manage Integration Tools → Allow Admin to Access OData API through Basic Authentication

• Metadata Framework → Access to non-secured objects (previously known as 'Read/Write Permission on Metadata Framework')

• Manage User → Manage Employee Dynamic Groups

  • This permission allows you to create employee groups for use with mentoring programs.

Under the User Permissions section, select the following:

• Career Development Planning → Mentoring Programs Access Permission

  • This permission provides users access to the Mentoring tab under Development.

• Employee Data → First Name → View

• Employee Data → Last Name → View

• General User Permission → Company Info Access → User Search

  • This permission allows users to search for mentees and mentors.

You can restrict mentor and mentee searches by setting a target population.

Once the appropriate Administrator Permissions are granted, the Manage Mentoring Programs options should appear in the Admin Center under the Career Development menu.

By default, mentoring administrators have permission to manage all mentoring programs in your organization. The Manage Administrator Permissions for Programs administrator permission under Role Based Permissions allows the granted role to specify which users/administrators are authorized to manage specific mentoring programs.

When this permissions is granted, the user will have an additional Administrator Permission Configuration option under the Mentoring Program Settings. This page allows administrator permissions to be granted for specific mentoring programs, so admins can grant access to users to manage just one mentoring program.

Under the Administrator Permissions:

• Metadata Framework → Access to non-secured objects (previously known as 'Read/Write Permission on Metadata Framework')

Under the User Permissions section:

• Career Development Planning → Mentoring Programs Access Permission

  • This permission provides users access to the Mentoring tab under Development.

• Employee Data → First Name → View

• Employee Data → Last Name → View

• General User Permission → Company Info Access → User Search

  • This permission allows users to search for mentees and mentors.

You can restrict mentor and mentee searches by setting a target population.

The Mentoring Access Permission grants permission to the Mentoring area within CDP. It is located in the Admin Center. Navigate to Set User Permissions → Manage Permission Roles.

Within Development, you can see the mentoring program if your role is granted the Mentoring Access Permission.

Select the buttons to learn about the types of mentoring programs.

A system administrator is given three options of mentoring programs to choose from when creating a new mentoring program.

1. Supervised: This allows the administrator high structure and control over the program, timelines, and matching experience. This type of program requires more interaction and management from the administrator.
2. Unsupervised: This allows the administrator more flexibility while maintaining some structure around the matching process. The mentoring wizards for this type work similarly to those for the supervised type, but they do not require as much oversight.
3. Open Enrollment: This is the most flexible type of program for all. This program type allows the administrator to provide some broad parameters around the program, and then step out of the matching process. Open Enrollment gives mentors and mentees the freedom to match and participate more fluidly.

Depending on the desired program and audience, the organization may choose to use one or all of the types at one point or another.

To create a mentoring program, use action search to navigate to Manage Mentoring Programs.

First, the type of mentoring program must be selected. The administrator can designate whether program-matching is supervised or unsupervised by selecting the Supervised or Unsupervised Mentoring Program. Supervised matching means that the administrator kicks off the matching and makes any desired changes. Unsupervised matching means mentees must choose preferred mentors when signing up. Mentors approve/decline match requests from mentees.

Follow the wizard and begin filling out the necessary information such as the following:

• Program name

• Program description

• Program owner: Program owners can administer mentoring programs but cannot create them.

You can also brand your program and upload an image if you'd like.

Administrators can define a maximum number of mentees per mentors, and a maximum number of mentors per mentees.

After the program is created and in progress, admins and program-owners can still change the limits in program overview pages. In addition, when mentors sign up for a mentoring program, they can also adjust the number of mentees they wish to be paired with, up to the limit you have defined for the program.

It means that a particular mentee, in a specific mentoring program, can have more than one mentor. Similarly, a particular mentor, in a specific mentoring program, can have more than one mentee.

There is also an option which allows participants to end the mentoring relationship if needed. The organization can decide if they want the participants to be able to end the relationship or if the administrator/owners should have control of the mentoring relationship.

When a Mentoring Program Administrator defines the parameters within Manage Mentoring Programs, a maximum threshold of mentors and mentees determines the number of mentors per mentee or mentees per mentor allowed. These guidelines create a hard stop to the number of mentors or mentees a participant can have within this program. If allow participants to end the mentoring relationship is enabled, the system will not include mentoring relationships that have ended when calculating thresholds.

The key dates for the program need to be entered, and all date fields are mandatory.

• For unsupervised mentoring programs, the system will automatically trigger the next step or status on the dates you specify. You also have the option of manually pushing the program through each step.
• For supervised mentoring programs, you need to manually push the program through each step.

At the bottom of each page, there is a Next button to move to the next step in setting up the Mentoring program. You can also choose Save to save the program and return to the setup process later.

Adding mentors and mentees can be accomplished one at a time or by dynamic group.

Simply begin typing the name of the employee or search for the dynamic group.

When managing the participation of mentors within a program, filter options in the Mentors tab allows administrators to review all pending requests by status and approve requests conveniently from this area. The filters give the administrator the ability to see the status of the following:

• Pending
• Declined
• Accepted
  • Available
  • Unavailable

For each mentoring program that you create, you also design the Signup Form. The Signup Form is where an administrator defines questions presented to the mentor or mentee when registering for a program. The answers to these questions can then be used to match the mentors and mentees.

The first option in the matching rules is the Question Category. The Question Category can be a Free Text question. You can select from the list of standard picklists, or you can configure custom picklists. Both standard and custom picklists can be used more than once.

If Pick List is selected for the Answer Type, then choose a category from the Selection Value list. The following fields are supported:

• Attribute/Competency
• Location
• Country/Region
• Department
• Division
• Gender
• Job Family
• Job Role
• Job Code
• Job Level
• Job Title
• Skill (Job Profile Builder is required)

To add a custom picklist for Mentoring, back on the main Manage Mentoring Programs page, there is a link to access the Settings on the top right-hand side. There will be an option Custom Picklist Configuration to be used for the Mentoring Signup Form.

Free text answers are supported but not included in matching criteria. They’re a great option for mentors and mentees to learn more about each other and to help in the selection process for unsupervised and open enrollment programs.

Once you’ve selected your Question Category, you’ll need to define a matching rule for each question.

Select the buttons to learn more about Matching Rules.

Matching is based on the criteria defined below:

• Preferences: You define questions both for mentors and mentees. They are matched based on the answers to the questions.
• Mentee's Preference: You define questions for mentees only. Mentors and mentees are matched based on mentees’ answers and mentors’ employee profiles.
• Mentor’s Preference : You define questions for mentors only. Mentors and mentees are matched based on mentors’ answers and mentees’ employee profiles.
• Profiles : You don’t define questions for mentors and mentees. They are matched based on employee profiles.

If your matching is based on Free Text or Preferences, you’ll need to define questions for the mentors and mentees. Your questions can be the same or different between the mentors and mentees.

Key questions may also be set up in the SignUp Form of the wizard. Enabling key questions is as simple as a checkbox. Yet, this functionality plays an important role in the matching process. If mentors and mentees do not satisfy the matching rule of the key question, they will not be matched. To ensure that mentors are recommended to mentees, you cannot define all questions as key questions.

Administrators may also decide on the matching type. Most matching is accomplished when answers match between mentors and mentees. But occasionally you may want to have mentors and mentees "match" when their answers do NOT match. For example, if you do not want mentors and mentees to be in the same department you would use a matching type of Not Matched with a Question Category of Department and using employee’s Profiles.

Weighting questions allows the administrators to give higher or lower emphasis based on importance. You cannot give weights for key questions or the questions that are answered with free text. If you want to apply different weights and do not want a specific question to be included for matching, leave the weight field of the question empty. Make sure that the weights of all weighted questions add up to 100%.

When you have two or more questions, you can change the order of the questions using the arrows at the end of the question line.

As the system starts matching, it finds the best fit between mentors and mentees based on those matching rules.

Invitation notifications sent to mentees and mentors in supervised and unsupervised programs can be customized as part of the program configuration process. Within the program that utilizes invitations, go to the Signup Form step, and next to Email Template, select the Setup link to modify the email invitation templates.

Once you choose the Setup link, the invitations can be configured with specific text and tokens.

When using a program that matches mentors and mentees, automatic e-mails are triggered based on actions taken during the matching process.

E-mails are generated based on several events in addition to invitation events. Matching requests, matching confirmations, matching declinations/rejections, and other events trigger e-mail notifications in Mentoring. The email notifications can be customized in Admin Center → Email Notification Templates Settings. You can customize the e-mail subject and body in all supported languages or disable certain types of e-mail notifications.  A complete list of e-mail notifications and triggers is provided in the Mentoring Administration Guide found on the SAP Help Portal.

Once you’ve created your matching questions, the next step shows you a Summary page. After the Summary page, you’re ready to launch your mentoring program.

Using action search, navigate to Manage Mentoring Programs → Create New Mentoring Program. Select the Open Enrollment option and complete the wizard.

Many of the options available for Open Enrollment programs are the same as the Supervised and Unsupervised programs, such as details, description, and branding. However, other choices, such as Mentor Approval Method and Target Participants allow the administrator to set the flexibility and audience of the program.

With Open Enrollment programs, administrators can require a mentor to get approval from the mentoring program administrator/owner or their manager before they can participate in the program.

• If approval is by manager, then managers receive an e-mail and To Do notification on their home page whenever one of their employees signs up as a mentor. If the manager declines the mentor's request to participate, the mentor receives a notification, and they’re removed from the program. Their mentoring preferences and other information are not saved. The user can, if they choose to, sign up for the same program again.
• If the approval is by admin or owner, then mentors are required to upload supporting documents with their requests. The admin or owner can filter mentors by their participation status and approve the participation requests one by one.

When creating an open enrollment program, the default behavior is to invite all employees to participate. With the Target Participants field, you can limit participation to the mentoring program by selecting specific dynamic groups.

After making selections, the wizard offers the opportunity to define the matching questions as in the supervised and unsupervised programs.

Deep links enable administrators to share open enrollment programs conveniently with potential participants. You may include a deep link to the specific mentoring program in the communication to be used in an e-mail, an intranet page, even an LMS item, or any other medium. Selecting this deep link takes the user directly to the sign-up page for a mentoring program. Links can be generated for mentee and mentor sign-up pages as well. However, the links will not be seen in this area until after the program has moved to the in-progress state.

Once all details and questions are completed for your mentoring program, the Summary form appears with all of the program information. Be sure to verify the information before launching the program. Once the program is launched, it is difficult to edit or modify the program.

Once launched, the mentoring program is now active and available for reference in the Administrator view of the Manage Mentoring Programs section. If there is no approval process selected, the program will automatically move to the IN-PROGRESS status.

After the program is launched, the mentee sees the program details and decides whether or not to participate. If the mentoring program is an Open Enrollment program, it will not have a start date or end date and the notice states this.

When joining the program, the mentee gives preferences to the questions and potential mentors.

The mentee can select from the recommended mentors, or search for someone specifically.

Once the steps are finalized, the mentee receives a message in the system and awaits the mentor’s confirmation or decline.

Simultaneously, the mentor receives a notice of the mentee request. Based on the configuration of the program, a mentor may have multiple mentee requests or only one.

At this point, it is up to the mentor to accept or decline the mentee request. The system provides additional information, such as how many openings are left for mentees and their preferences. This assists the mentor in making a more informed decision, which is captured electronically in the system.

If the mentor accepts the request from the mentee, the mentoring relationship is fully acknowledged in the system and activities may be added for the mentee. These activities may include weekly or monthly meetings, special assignments, and simple task tracking. Up to 200 mentoring activities can be created, either by the mentor or mentee. The Activity Plan also includes a link to access Continuous Performance to create a 1:1 channel for ongoing meetings and activities. To access this section, navigate to View Mentoring Details.

Select the + (plus) sign to add your activities. This allows communication of actions necessary to create and track a productive mentor relationship. It also provides an avenue to end the relationship if the relationship become unhelpful, which can happen due to a variety of reasons, such as time constraints, lack of follow-through on actions, or one member of the relationship leaving the organization.

A program is in a draft status when it has been set up but not "launched" yet (not the same as starting a program, more like saving a program to a read-only state).

You leave a program in draft state by choosing Save, rather than Save and launch. In this state, all elements are still editable.

A program is in a Confirmed Status when it has been launched but no invitations have been sent yet. The blue action button shows Send Email to Mentors Now.

A program is in Mentor Sign-up Status when it has been launched and mentor invitations sent out. You can see how many invited mentors have signed up so far on the program card.

A program is in Mentee Sign-Up status when it has been launched, mentors' invitations are sent out, mentors signed up, mentees' invitations are sent out, and mentees can sign up.

When we select the Mentoring Program Details icon, we will see if additional mentors declined or signed up, and we can also see the number of mentees who signed up or who declined.

• For unsupervised programs, there is a Start button that will move the program to in-progress.

• For supervised programs, there is a Match Now button to initiate the matching process once mentors and mentees signed up. Once the administrator starts the matching for a program, no more mentees can sign up. Any mentees attempting to sign up after matching has started are redirected to a landing page explaining that they have missed the deadline for sign-up. The matching algorithm goes through mentor and mentee records to find matches that are based first on preferences and then on the data from the profile. Once administrators confirm the matches, they will have the option to start the program to move it to in-progress.

To ensure optimal system performance when the system matches mentors and mentees, do not add more than 3,000 mentors or 3,000 mentees to a supervised program. A program wizard will validate the number of invitees and prevent the saving and launching of a program with too many invitees.

The original concept of supervised mentoring programs assumed they would be closely monitored by administrators and therefore small. However, some customers also want to use this type of program with larger numbers of participants than originally anticipated. Because there is a limit to the performance of the algorithm, there will be an error message if the user tries to add more than 3,000 mentors or 3,000 mentees into supervised programs.

It is, however, fine to have more than 3,000 participants in total if they are distributed between the mentors and mentees and respect the limit of 3,000 in each group.

When you run matching on a supervised mentoring program, the system uses an algorithm to compare preferences and profile data to suggest matches for mentors and mentees.

Once a program has mentors and mentees signed up, you can select Match Now and a back-end matching job will start.

1. Navigate to Manage Mentoring Programs using action search.
2. Locate the mentoring program in the Not Started section and choose Match Now.
3. There is a pop-up message to confirm that we want to proceed and that the system should start the matching job. Choose Continue.
4. A very quick message shows up on the program card saying Success. The job starts. The program is still in the Not Started section, but the button Start is not available.
5. Choose the Program Name to review the matches.

   The matching algorithm goes through mentor and mentee records to find matches that are based first on preferences and then on profile data. The system assigns the following match levels to the resulting matches.

   • Preferred (four stars): The mentee has been matched with one of the preferred mentors selected during sign-up.
   • Excellent (three stars): The mentee has been matched with a mentor with whom he or she has a 75% or higher matching score.
   • Good (two stars): The mentee has been matched with a mentor with whom he or she has a 74.99% to 50% matching score.
   • Average (one star): The mentee has been matched with a mentor with whom he or she has a 49.99% or lower matching score.
   
6. After the matching job completes, review and edit the matches on the program overview page.

   You can adjust matches from the program overview page after the mentoring program has started.

   1. To change a match, go to the mentee card and select the Remove icon to remove a match or the Assign icon to assign a new mentor. The mentee and mentor move to the Not Matched tab where you can assign a new match.

      If the mentor is matched with more than one mentee, then the mentor is only moved to the Not Matched if you remove all mentee matches.

   2. Review the Not Matched tab for any mentees remaining unmatched. The matching algorithm may return initial results with some mentees and mentors unmatched. The circumstances for this result may include:

      • More mentors than mentees signed up for the program

      • Not enough mentors signed up for the program

7. If necessary, refresh the page and the button Start becomes available.
8. When ready, go to the Mentoring program card and choose Start. From the confirmation popup window, choose Continue. This moves the program status to In-Progress. The Mentoring Match e-mail is sent to all matched mentors and mentees informing them of the match. They can view the match details on the Mentoring page.

When assigning mentors or mentees, only 200 participants are listed on the Assign New Mentor/Mentee pop-up. If more than 200 participants are available, the administrator can refine the search criteria to find target participants.

When the administrator assigns mentors or mentees, or removes mentees from matched mentors, the system updates your changes automatically. The adjustments are saved immediately with an autosave functionality.

The Matched page shows the first 200 matches and the Not Matched page shows the first 500 participants. The administrator can then search participants among all matched and unmatched lists by name. For supervised mentoring programs, it is also possible to select a matching level to filter the matched results.

Employees navigate from their home page to Mentoring, which is found under Development.

When employees are invited to be a mentor, the invitation often has important program information, such as description, duration, and deadline dates for sign up.

Employees who sign up as mentors choose their preferences which may include what location or locations they would prefer mentees to be. This can help with scheduling, especially in a global company.

Key questions are marked with a red asterisk in the Mentoring sign-up form. Participants must answer these questions before they can complete sign-up or check recommended mentors. If mentors and mentees don't satisfy the matching rule of key questions, mentors aren't recommended to mentees. This ensures that participants don't miss these questions, which may improve matching results.

Mentors can be required to upload documents that demonstrate their qualifications as a mentor.

Mentors do not need to complete all sign-up steps at one time. They can save their progress and return at a future time to complete the sign-up process.

If a program is configured to require approval, mentors will see a participation pending message above the program until permission is granted by an administrator or manager. Managers can approve or decline employee requests to be a mentor on the home page. For more details, see the Home Page Guide on the SAP Help Portal.

The mentee sign-up experience is similar to the mentor sign-up experience. After selecting preferences from the Welcome screen, mentees can view suggested matches or search for mentors.

After a mentor signs up in an unsupervised or open enrollment mentoring program, mentees send mentoring requests to that mentor, which the mentor can either accept or decline. When a mentee requests a potential mentor, the mentor receives an e-mail notification and they see a Mentoring Request tile on their home page. They can also see a new pending request notification within the mentoring program. Mentees can review mentor requests they have sent from within the mentoring programs. They can see accepted requests as well as declined requests along with explanations provided by mentors.

Mentors can also see mentee requests along with the option to approve or reject them.

Until a mentor accepts the mentee, the pending request will appear on the Pending Requests page of the mentoring program. Administrators and program owners can view mentors, mentees, and requested dates.

When a mentor chooses to decline a mentoring request, that mentor can add a note that will be included in the notification e-mail to the mentee.

When a mentor chooses to accept a mentoring request, the mentor-mentee relationship continues until one of them ends the relationship or the mentoring program ends.

Once a match is designated or approved, the mentee and mentor can view information on the Mentor Quickcard including:

1. User's name
2. User's title or job title (depending upon whether or not Employee Central is used)
3. Job family (either from Legacy Families and Roles or from Job Profile Builder)

Administrators need to confirm that employees in mentoring programs have the correct RBP permissions to see details about other employees. This is controlled in permission roles under Employee Data.

Mentors in open enrollment or unsupervised programs can receive up to 20 mentoring requests at a time.

When the setting is enabled during the creation of the mentoring program, either party (mentor or mentee) may end the mentoring relationship by simply selecting the End relationship option. If you have the Qualtrics solution, a survey can be launched to gather feedback on the individual experience even if the mentor program is ongoing.

You can send a Qualtrics feedback opportunity to all mentoring program participants when the program ends. Using this feature requires a Qualtrics Employee Experience license so that you can create lifecycle projects. You also need to integrate SAP SuccessFactors with Qualtrics and enable Intelligent Services and SAP SuccessFactors Integration Center.

You can learn more about this feature on the SAP Help Portal in the guide: Integrating SAP SuccessFactors with Qualtrics.