How to Scale Your Team Without Losing the Culture That Makes People Stay
with Melanie Ferreira,
HR Assistant, Elexon
with Melanie Ferreira,
HR Assistant, Elexon
Elexon plays a vital role in keeping Great Britain’s electricity market running smoothly, and behind that mission is a team that’s grown fast, from around 200 people to nearly 400 in the space of three years.
Growth like that can strain the sense of community a smaller organisation takes for granted. At Elexon, it hasn’t: exec members still know people by name, and the culture remains one where, as Melanie puts it, people feel comfortable asking questions — “a home away from home.”
Elexon already had a strong learning and development culture, but Melanie and her team noticed something missing: people with deep knowledge and experience simply weren’t connected to each other. Colleagues in different teams, at different career stages, with completely different backgrounds, had no natural way to learn from one another. “Sometimes one conversation with the right person can change how someone sees themselves and what’s possible for them,” Melanie says — and that’s the opportunity that led Elexon to Mentorloop.
Since launching, Melanie has seen a real shift in how people engage with development across the organisation. What used to happen informally, or only within certain existing networks, is now structured and accessible to everyone. The programme has brought together people across teams, roles and levels of experience — creating knowledge-sharing opportunities that, as Melanie notes, “wouldn’t necessarily happen organically.”
Perhaps the most telling sign of success: word of mouth has done most of the recruiting. “I only had to do that once,” Melanie says of her original programme launch — since then, colleagues have talked about it, recommended it, and asked to be part of it. While participation and engagement numbers matter, what Melanie is proudest of is simpler: mentoring has become a normal, valued part of how people grow at Elexon.
For Melanie, the real turning point wasn’t a metric — it was the stories. Hearing that a single conversation with a mentor had given someone confidence, helped them see a different path, or made them feel that someone genuinely believed in them.
"We weren't just matching people. We were helping people feel more connected to each other at Elexon — and that's when you've created something that can genuinely change culture."
People became more open, more willing to share their experiences and challenges, and more supportive of colleagues across the organisation.
“Mentorloop has been my hero,” Melanie says, only half-joking. What could have been a time-consuming, complicated process to run manually became simple. She describes the platform’s matching experience as “kind of like a Tinder for mentoring,” where people browse profiles, reach out, and choose to connect. What she values most, though, is the balance: Mentorloop handles the heavy administrative lifting without stripping out the human element. “The technology creates the opportunity, but it’s the conversations between the people that creates the impact.”
Her experience broke several mentoring program myths:
Mentorloop’s matching engine replaces spreadsheets and guesswork with structured, self-serve connections — described by Melanie as “kind of like a Tinder for mentoring”: people browse profiles and choose to connect, creating pairings that wouldn’t happen organically. Smart Match can compound this even more.
Mentorloop absorbs the heavy administrative lifting of running a programme at scale — freeing a single coordinator to manage a programme for hundreds of people.
Mentorloop’s structure runs in the background without replacing the human element. The right content is surfaced at the right time for each individual. “The technology creates the opportunity, but it’s the conversations between the people that create the impact.”
Melanie isn’t done. She wants to see mentoring reach even more people across Elexon and become further embedded in how the organisation thinks about development, connection, and belonging – more unexpected pairings, more people discovering perspectives and opportunities they wouldn’t have found otherwise. Her north star: a culture where people don’t just ask “who can help me develop,” but also “who can I help.”
"The technology creates the opportunity, but it's the conversations between the people that create the impact."
What Melanie wants other HR leaders to understand is that the impact didn’t stay contained to individual mentor-mentee relationships:
“The programme has helped foster a culture where development, knowledge-sharing and supporting one another feel like something we all have a role in. It has created space for conversations that might not naturally happen in the workplace and has helped strengthen connections across different levels, teams and experiences.”
“It isn’t simply a mentoring initiative, but a contributor to a more connected, collaborative and supportive company culture.”
For a growing organization, that’s not just a nice sentiment; it’s a compounding effect. Every cross-team, cross-level conversation the programme creates is knowledge that stops staying siloed, and a relationship that makes someone more likely to stay.
This kind of ripple effect shows up in engagement and retention numbers long after the individual mentoring pair has finished meeting.
See how Mentorloop can help your team build the same kind of connected, ripple-effect culture as you scale:
HR Assistant, Elexon
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"Mentorloop has helped us create more than mentoring relationships - it has created a culture where people feel connected, supported and empowered to help each other grow."
– with Melanie Ferreira, HR Assistant, Elexon
What Role Does Equity and Equality Play in Your Mentoring Program?
The right mentoring program should level the playing field to empower entire cohorts of people: workplaces, member associations, social groups and educational institutions. Equality should be a cherished value so that every individual can thrive—whoever they are, whatever their background, however they worship or whomever they love. But we can’t arrive at equality without it’s often forgotten partner, equity.
What does a Mentoring Program Coordinator do?
Being a Mentoring Program Coordinator is an incredibly rewarding experience that positively impacts the lives of many. And while mentoring programs don’t fully run themselves (even though Mentorloop can do a great deal of the heavy lifting!), they do require a point of contact that can steer the program in the right direction for the organisation that is running one.
Building Quality Feedback Into Mentoring Relationships
This is Part 8 of our 10-part series on the 10 Key Qualities and Habits of a Highly Effective Mentor.
In this post, we’ll look at how mentors can successfully build quality feedback into their mentoring. Quality feedback is priceless because it clarifies expectations, helps people learn from their mistakes, and builds confidence. It also allows mentees to more effectively take what their mentors say and turn it into action.
