Mentoring at Delivery Hero: Everything you need to know

In this second article of our mentoring series, we dive deeper into the program and uncover all the important information through data, insights and feedback. 

Recap: What is Mentoring at Delivery Hero?

Mentoring at Delivery Hero is an open self-matching mentoring program connecting mentors and mentees from across Delivery Hero.

Open: meaning anyone at Delivery Hero who meets the eligibility criteria can join the program.

Self-matching: meaning, mentees can request available mentors out of the list.

Who takes part? 

Mentors:

Our mentors are senior employees with at least 5 years of work experience and minimum IC3 level, who have been with Delivery Hero for at least one year. They have a strong performance rating and can commit to at least one meeting per month for the next 12 months.

A mentor can have up to 3 mentoring relationships at the same time, but we strongly recommend people to start slow and take into account their own workload. 

As our executive sponsor, long-time mentor and Chief Technology Officer at Delivery Hero, Benjamin Mann calculated that, as a mentor; “You need to clock in at least 5 hours per mentee per month.” So that is the guidance that we share with our participants!

Mentees:

Anyone who has worked more than 3 months at Delivery Hero can join the program as a mentee, irrespective of the level. What’s important is the commitment to be in the driving seat of the program - reaching out to the mentor to schedule calls, own the agenda, follow up and show up prepared - We strongly believe that it is an important part of a mentee’s learning journey.

A mentee can only have one mentor at a time. At the same time, our participants can join the program both as a mentor and as a mentee and we have plenty of cases just like that.

Mentoring is an amazing learning opportunity for mentors and mentees likewise. As Benjamin Mann said: “I am yet to meet a mentee from whom I haven’t learnt anything”.

For mentors, besides being an extremely rewarding experience, it is also a great environment to hone their leadership skills outside of their immediate team.

Matching

When our participants enroll into the platform, they are asked to fill in a questionnaire and to take a quick personality assessment in order to match them with a partner. The questionnaire invites them to choose up to 5 focus areas in which they offer expertise (as mentors) or seek growth (as mentees) across three main pillars - Growth Planning and Personal Development, Leadership and Management Development and Department-specific Skills (Tech, Product, Marketing, Finance etc.)

The chosen focus areas comprise 50% of the matching weight, the rest is made via the personality assessment, leveling criteria and matching preferences (gender, job family, ERG they are involved with).

Based on the matching results, mentees are offered a list of mentors to choose from and invited to request a match from a mentor of their choice.

If by the end of the enrolment window there are unmatched mentees left on the platform, the program administrator runs algorithmic matching and the participants are matched automatically based on the highest matching score.

Resources & Support

Besides hands-on support from the program administrators, we offer a wide range of learning and training resources. During almost four years of the program’s existence we have built best practice guides and different templates for the participants to structure their mentoring journey. 

Our partner, MentorcliQ, also offers on demand training for mentors, as well as a vast library of articles and videos covering all stages of the mentoring process and possible challenges.

The Numbers

Since the program was opened to everyone at Delivery Hero in October 2022, there have been 1,161 mentors and mentees matched through the platform. This exact number is made up of 490 mentors and 950 mentees.There has been an estimated 4,705  total hours of mentorship that has taken place, however due to the survey response being only 20% (only one fifth of the total number of the participants) we assume that the actually number of hours spent on mentoring by all participants is actually 5x times higher, which gives us around 21,250 hours!

The most important success metric for us at Delivery Hero is the program satisfaction metric - how do our participants feel about the programs, resources, support and training they are being offered.

As well as relationship satisfaction, how do they feel about their mentoring relationship overall.  The latter score measures how open-minded, supportive, prepared, knowledgeable and committed the mentoring partners were. Besides measuring the numbers, we also look closely at the qualitative feedback.

We send a satisfaction survey to participants in order to measure this. Current scores stand at 4.4 out of 5 for program satisfaction, and an impressive 4.8 out of 5 for relationship satisfaction - well above industry standards for a mentoring program.  

Final words from our executive sponsor

We finish with some final words from our executive sponsor and CTO, Benjamin Mann on his thoughts on why someone should become a mentor: 

“Having been a mentor myself for almost 15 years, I believe it is one of the most rewarding things you can do. It is such a crucial thing that I would never want to stop doing.

First, it’s just such a nice feeling to be able to help someone with their problems! The second part is more “egoistic”, it allows me to get insights into areas, scenarios and problems that I may not be exposed to directly, or I may have already forgotten as I progress through my career.

It helps me to stay in touch with what’s happening in the organization, and it can be very enlightening.It’s also a bit of reverse mentoring - when you learn something from your mentee

 And thirdly, if you do it consistently and on a larger scale, it gives you an opportunity to match problems with the potential problem-solvers and unlock great synergies”