Mentoring comes back as nurse retention effort
Relationships boost job satisfaction
If you haven’t heard, an old buzzword gaining currency again in nursing circles is mentoring. True, the idea has been around for ages, but the cycle seems to be turning once again in favor of nurse mentoring as one of the best forms of staff development.
The Illinois Organization of Nurse Leaders (IONL) in Carbondale and the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) are two organizations that support mentoring in an effort to address nursing work force problems.
"Nurse mentoring is now as much a sophisticated science as it is an art," says Catherine Neuman, RN, MSN, a member of the IONL committee in Carbondale, IL.
"The discipline has gone in and out of fashion, but has never gone away," adds Neuman, who is also administrative director of patient care services at Memorial Hospital of Carbondale.
Managers lack mentoring skills
The Chicago-based AONE is pushing the idea of mentoring as an effective means of generating nurse retention and job satisfaction. And with staff shortages and retention problems in ICUs running high, nowhere is the need for mentoring more acute than in critical care, advocates say.
Yet despite considerable research and years of practice, nursing departments know little about the fundamentals of this form of staff development, and many even confuse mentoring with other workplace learning relationships, Neuman asserts. For example:
• Nursing supervisors, especially many in critical care, generally look at mentoring as something of a sideline activity to be scraped together if there’s time, and in loose fashion.
• As a result of the relegated low priority given to the activity, nursing "administrators often select the wrong nurses for the job, or they don’t give the process sufficient time and management support," Neuman says.
• Mentoring programs also get shortchanged by a low investment in time spent by a mentor with a nurse, or mentee, and a lack of additional resources, such as sponsored seminars or tuition reimbursements.
Research shows that nurses, especially inexperienced ones, usually benefit from someone who is designated to be available over a long period of time and isn’t a nurse preceptor or a mother hen, but an adviser and pundit for nurses.1
"A mentor can impart a broad scope of wisdom and knowledge about working with critically ill patients," says Neuman.
But the mentoring process is complex and beset by so-called "human variables," such as compatibility factors between mentor and mentee, the availability of time for mentoring, and management’s commitment to the activity, she observes.
The human variables are what often undermine a mentoring program, Neuman adds.
For managers, the fundamental issue at the outset is selecting the appropriate nurse to function as a mentor, says Marilyn Oermann, RN, PhD, a nursing professor and an expert on mentoring at Wayne State University in Detroit. The right individual can achieve great things in the unit, she says.
Therefore, the mentor’s role must be clearly defined and distinguished from other individuals in the staff development process. "Mentors are not preceptors or sponsors. They aren’t friends, allies, and especially not mother hens to nurses, but more like advisers and role models," Oermann explains. (The box, above, outlines the differences.)
Veteran mentors have identified several stages in a mentoring relationship. The first, called "the initiation," focuses on determining a suitable match and is likely to be the most important, advocates argue. "It’s is probably the cornerstone of a successful program. There’s got to be good chemistry there between the mentor and nurse," Neuman says.
The initiation stage establishes a suitable match between a mentor and a mentee. Neuman and Oermann both emphasize that the mentor nurse has to be someone with wisdom, experience, maturity, and people skills.
But he or she also has to have the right character, values, and personal philosophy to offer the nurse mentee the correct advice, guidance, and feedback, Oermann says.
Compatibility often determines the success of the other three, Neuman observes. IONL officials recommend that administrators give nurse mentees the option of selecting their mentors through interviews.
The interview questions might be:
• Why are you choosing to be a mentor?
• What special skills do you have to offer?
• Do you have the time to devote to mentoring?
• What amount of time do you expect this process to take?
• Do you have any preset conditions or rules for this relationship?
• What do you expect of a mentee?
In turn, the prospective mentor should interview the nurse mentee with similar telling questions regarding the reasons, motivations, and willingness of a nurse to enter into a mentoring relationship, the IONL recommendations note.
The mentor’s qualifications for the job can greatly enhance the other factors underlying a successful mentoring program, says Neuman. Two major components of a successful relationship include:
1. A needs assessment.
Determine areas of need and priorities, says Neuman. Although the mentoring process doesn’t require strict adherence to instructional plans, it should involve some specific areas of nursing in which the mentor can positively influence the staff.
Some typical areas for mentors to focus on might be to address staff burnout, balancing work and personal life, adjusting to rotating schedules, and working with patients’ families, Oermann notes.
2. Defined goals and expectations.
Although most mentor relationships aren’t fixed in time, there should be a general expectation regarding what will be achieved within a certain period of time, Oermann says.
Determine at the outset what is expected of the mentoring relationship and roughly how long it will last. For example, following their preceptorship, inexperienced new nurses may be assigned a mentor for six months to adjust fully to the demands of the working environment, Neuman says.
Most mentoring advocates caution that the process requires additional time and energy from nurses. It could mean placing extra stress on already demanding work schedules.
Also, the process can backfire and result in nurses who get over-dependent on their mentors, which can interfere with workplace performance or independent thinking. The relationships also can lead to mimicking rather than genuine internalizing of positive learned behaviors, IONL cautions.
However, in most cases the benefits outweigh the risks. If properly conducted, the mentoring relationship can help boost job satisfaction and therefore allow units to retain their nurses longer, Neuman says.
Reference
1. The Mentoring Committee of the Illinois Organization of Nurse Leaders. Mentoring: Sharing the Art Within Our Profession. Carbondale, IL; 1999.
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