How Chronus helps T-Mobile connect and engage its workforce

Mentorship programs are a great way to help people establish relationships and build professional skills. And as global wireless giant T-Mobile has found, the business benefits can go even further.

With U.S. employee engagement at a disturbing low of 32%, according to Gallup, many employers are looking at professional growth opportunities as a way to increase worker satisfaction. This is a high priority for T-Mobile, which has around 67,000 workers worldwide. In 2019, the company partnered with mentoring and employee resource group management platform Chronus and have since seen a noticeable boost in employee satisfaction. 

"We want a very connected workforce; we want people to share their experiences, their knowledge, and do that across the business." says Cathy Nelson, T-Mobile's senior manager of talent management. "We're very dispersed, so we were really looking for a way to help people connect beyond their retail store, call center, or office. But when everyone was working from home during COVID, the priority of mentoring rose to the top even more."

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Incorporating a well-designed mentoring program is a great way to promote career development, and for T-Mobile, it has also led to cross-department connections among employees and a boost in retention. The company introduced Chronus's program within its ERGs, and has now expanded its use to one-on-one mentorship, matching more than 2,000 employees with mentoring circles, which allow any number of employees to connect and collaborate.  

"One of the biggest things we find is, how do you not only retain your people over time, but help them thrive?" says David Satterwhite, Chronus's CEO. "They have to feel connected with other people in the organization. One of the things Cathy and her team have done so well is they really do this purposefully. The connections go cross-functionally and cross-geography, so you not only get [employees] connecting with [each other], but you're bringing together people from different silos in the company."

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Thanks to its data-driven, technology-based matching, Chronus's mentoring tools democratize mentoring efforts and lift the burden of manually connecting employees off of leadership's shoulders, says Nelson. While the mentoring circles are used with affinity groups and therefore more targeted, the one-on-one program is available for everyone, and empowers employees to be in charge of their own interaction. 

"The technology behind it enables ease of use, enables people to find each other based on certain criteria that they enter, and really just lets me stand up a program and then let employees run with it on their own," she says. "They sign up, fill out a profile, and they could start looking for mentors or mentees right away."

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All of the programs' participation data is tracked, and the results speak for themselves: Among the T-Mobile employees who have used the Chronus offering, there has been a 26% increase in career mobility, a 37% increase in retention, and 56% of cross-business connections have been through worker engagement on the platform. 

Part of this success comes from Chronus' variety of approaches to mentor-mentee opportunities, and employers' ability to select and insert whichever of these they think will be most impactful for their workforce. Satterwhite notes that when businesses are looking to bring in mentorship options, it's crucial to find programs that fit individual workforce populations and their work setups, from in-office to hybrid to remote. Only then will they get the most out of their efforts.

"We can't just leave this to faith, especially in this remote world," he says. "We've got to proactively set something up. We're trying to meet customers where they are, both from a specific solutions perspective as well as the impact that they're focused on making, right off the bat."