Woolworths saves over 250+ hours using Smart Match

with Tracey Furno
Senior Culture and People Partner,
Woolworths Group

What Woolworths loves most about Mentorloop:

Smart matched 425 in one go

From weeks of matching, to seconds

Mentorloop’s mentoring experts tailored the matching algorithm to take into account a participants' details such as goals, department and skill gaps, saving Tracey’s time and effort.

91% Participant Satisfaction

Positive feedback from mentors/mentees

Another successful year of mentoring, feedback was consistently gathered from mentoring participants with some incredible qualitative feedback to match.

Mentorloop Impact Award Winner 2023

We have over 250 positive comments regarding their experience in their loops

Lisa was really great, she brought a fresh perspective and a clarity of purpose to the meeting that really helped me to set my sights on my next steps for self improvement.

Anju has been very open and has really helped me look at my career in a different light. it has been very motivational to be in contact with Anju and I am looking forward to the year ahead.

I think Luana and I have a great relationship and can give each other perspectives on different situations. Luana appreciates my advice and support and the relationship helps her with the challenges she's facing.

We have had a couple of meetings now and worked out how to provide opportunities to Ishesh where he can demonstrate his capabilities beyond current day to day activities for growth.

Catherine has grown confidence in her abilities which has enabled her to positively contribute more.

I received valuable information and feedback from Eric. He has wealth of knowledge in data analytics and shared some of his insights. Also he is welcoming and open to have a casual chat.

The elements of Michelle’s role that she was interested in developing were something that I felt I could contribute to through lived experience. Well matched!

Before Mentorloop

Woolworths is a large organisation made up of many other businesses and business units.

We believe that we are better together and are always looking for ways to connect our people together to be able to learn from, to solve problems, and to grow together.

Prior to implementing Mentorloop, we did not have one place for team members to search for and request to be a mentor or mentee. This request usually came to the HR representative, who, by typically only having a line of sight of their business unit, would attempt to source, match, and manage participants.

This made scaling programs very difficult as this would have to be completed in addition to their day jobs.

This also left very little time for additional builds such as program quality assessments and growth.

We knew we needed a more robust solution.

Program Impact

Our primary objective through the implementation of Mentorloop was to spark connections, as we know that once people connect, the possibilities are endless.

This is evidenced through the close to 250 4- and 5-star commentary provided by our team members over the past few months.

Our program has grown by close to 30% over the past 6 months as our team members begin to realise the benefit of being able to connect with people across the business that they may not have the opportunity for given the size, scale, and locations of our businesses.

Over 425 loops have been created, which for us translates to 425 new connections, ideas, and opportunities that might not have happened before.

Our match rate has remained over 70% throughout our program (currently at 73%), and we continue to grow that through the use of both self-match and smart-match functionality.

Smart Match has helped us to scale the program as we onboard whole businesses and help team members get started in a mentoring relationship and has saved us a tremendous amount of hours (estimated at over 250 hours), that would have otherwise been spent on categorising, matching, managing and reporting.

Looking to the Future

We plan to continue to grow our program as we onboard more and more business units. As we head into goal-setting and development plans season, Mentorloop provides us with a good platform to enable team members to find assistance from people within our business to consolidate their learnings.

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Growing our Mentoring Program by 30% over the past 6 months, our team members have begun to realise the benefit of being able to connect with people across the business that they may not have the opportunity for given the size, scale, and locations of our businesses.

– Tracey Furno,Senior Culture and People Partner