How to Start Mentoring Every Employee (Not Just the Ones at the Top)

There is a conversation happening in boardrooms right now about talent retention, employee engagement, and the cost of turnover. And in almost every case, the solution being discussed is some version of the same thing. Better leadership. More training for managers. Executive coaching programmes.

Nobody is talking about the apprentice. The administrator. The care worker clocking in at 6am. The shop floor worker who has been with the company for eight years and never once had a development conversation.

That is not an accident. It is a pattern. And it is costing businesses far more than they realise.

The Mentoring Gap Is Not a Leadership Problem. It Is a Workforce Problem.

76% of people say they want a mentor. Only 37% have one. That gap does not fall on the people at the top. It falls on everyone else. The people who keep the operation running, who hold institutional knowledge, who show up every day without recognition or direction.

When those people leave, they do not just take their skills. They take everything they knew about how things actually work.

So How Do You Start Mentoring Every Employee?

You start by accepting that a formal mentoring programme is not the answer for most organisations. Formal programmes are expensive, slow to implement, and often benefit the same people who already have access to development. They solve the symptom, not the problem.

The real answer is simpler. Give every employee a starting point.

Not a manager. Not a programme. A starting point. Something that says to every person in your organisation, regardless of their role or seniority, that their growth matters. That someone has thought about them. That they are not invisible.

What a Starting Point Looks Like in Practice

It does not need to be complicated. The most powerful thing a business can do for a forgotten employee is give them something that helps them think, reflect, and begin to understand their own direction.

A book that speaks to where they actually are, not where a manager thinks they should be. A journal that gives them space to process their work and their ambitions. Tools that treat them like someone worth investing in.

That is the gap Ten Mentors was built to fill. The box is not a mentoring programme. It is what comes before one. It is the thing that gets an employee ready to be mentored, motivated enough to seek one out, and clear enough about their direction to make something of it when it arrives.

The Business Case Is Straightforward

Employees who feel invested in stay longer. Employees who have no development leave faster. The cost of replacing a frontline worker is estimated at between 50% and 200% of their annual salary when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.

A box costs a fraction of that. And it sends a message that no leaving gift or pizza Friday ever could.

Where to Start

Start with the people nobody else is starting with. Not your high potentials. Not your leadership pipeline. Start with the person who has been doing the same job for five years with no development conversation. The one who would never ask for help because they do not think they are the kind of person who gets it.

Give them something. Not a course they will never finish. Not a webinar they will forget by Thursday. Something physical. Something that says this is yours, this is the beginning, and you are worth this investment.

That is how you start mentoring every employee. One starting point at a time.

Ready to give your team a starting point? Get the Ten Mentors Box or get in touch about bulk orders.

Caoimhe Duggan is the founder of Ten Mentors and spent nearly 20 years leading operations across companies in Europe, Asia, and beyond. She served as Head of Operations Asia at Spencer Ogden, where she helped scale the business internationally and it was inside fast-growing companies like this that she watched the same pattern emerge everywhere: mentorship and guidance flowed to the most visible people, while the majority were left to figure things out alone.
Her career began early in workflow automation for law firms and eventually RDJ, where she was already building systems that helped people work better. She later became certified in Learning and Development through Stada in Singapore bringing a formal grounding in how people actually grow, learn, and change to everything she builds at Ten Mentors. That combination of operational scale, systems thinking, and human development became the foundation for Ten Mentors. A practical starting point for the people the traditional mentorship system leaves behind.
Beyond the box, Caoimhe hosts the Ten Mentors Podcast — short, honest conversations designed to close the guidance gap one lesson at a time. She is also the founder of mentoring music — a new category of music she created through Ten Mentors Music. The first platform of its kind, mentoring music uses human-written lyrics built around real mentoring themes, produced through modern AI tools — something Ten Mentors is open about. Music designed to help people think clearer, stay steady, and keep moving when things get hard.
Caoimhe writes about personal growth, mentoring, leadership, and what it actually takes to move forward without a map. She has travelled to over 120 countries, lost two brothers at a young age, and brings the kind of honesty to her writing that only comes from having actually lived through difficult things.
She is based between Ireland and Sweden. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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