Building Bridges: Exploring the Outcomes of a Mentoring Program

"Qooper is the most beautiful and effective software to connect employees for sales and support. And you make it super easy for us!"

Challenge

VF Corporation is one of the world’s largest apparel, footwear, and accessories companies, connecting people to the lifestyles, activities, and experiences they cherish most through a family of iconic outdoor, active, and workwear brands.

Before Qooper, VF corporation ran small mentoring programs using manual methods, matching mentors and mentees and requiring HR managers to spend hours comparing employee profiles. This was unsustainable as they looked to scale their program to improve employee engagement and connectivity.

Evaluation

After seeing the benefit and the workload that came with running mentoring programs, VF corporation decided to look for a matching tool. The 3 key solutions they looked for were a flexible mentor matching algorithm, a mobile application and robust reporting.

VF Corporation looked to engage retail employees and office staff to offer an open space for mentors and mentees to connect, find career guidance, develop skills and network within the company.

In order to achieve this goal, they needed a mentor matching tool that was flexible enough to include their values.

After the matching process, since their pilot program had front line employees, they did look for a mobile application for mentorship.

Finally, robust reporting to see metrics on who is participating and how many employees are connected.

After reviewing multiple vendors, Sarah had a conversation with her manager to get budget approval.

In this process, VF Corporation's point of contact, Omer, supported them with a 1 pager and a program brochure which finally got the approval to move forward with Qooper and to get started.

Implementation & Adoption

As the first step in Qooper's onboarding process, VF Corporation initially scheduled an onboarding call with their dedicated Customer Success Manager.

For VF Corporation this person was Elona. During the onboarding phase, Elona gathered detailed information about the existing program, the expansion plan and the program goal to provide the right configuration recommendations to VF C..

Before launching the program, VF corporation wanted to test the experience they would provide to employees which they did with their dedicated CSM. Elona also conducted comprehensive training sessions for VF Corporations program administrator and pilot (user/employee) group to get familiar with the mentoring program and Qooper.

This initial program's goal, which was acting as a pilot, was to connect retail workers (mentees) with office employees (mentors) to provide career opportunities for retail workers to transition to an office setting if they seeked to do so.

As the pilot started to show results, the program started to expand over multiple regions and VF Corporation decided to launch a company-wide program to provide mentorship and networking opportunities to more employees.

Over time, the program grew from a 100 participant pilot to over 1,500 employees including participants from sales, finance, support and more. The program continues to expand today.

Thanks to Sarah's efforts and Qooper's measurements, displaying results to leadership was essential here to get approval to expand the mentoring and networking initiatives at VF C. through Qooper.