Building Cross-Functional Mentorship at Intrepid Travel

How do you create a mentoring program that spans 26 countries and boasts an incredible 89% NPS? At Intrepid Travel, the answer is Elevate, a global mentoring program designed to enhance career growth and boost confidence across a diverse, international workforce.

Powered by Enboarder, Elevate won Enboarder’s JOY award for “Best Connected Journey” and delivers personalized learning journeys and tailored resources for mentors and managers. The result? More connections across the world, better communication and understanding, and up to 60% of the mentees earned promotions or transitioned into roles better aligned with their career goals.

In addition to the mentor program, Intrepid is using Enboarder to deliver journeys such as employee onboarding and learning development across its employee base. We recently sat down with Emma Petzey, global learning partner at Intrepid Travel, to chat about the award-winning mentoring journey, the connections it’s built, and her advice for building successful employee journeys with Enboarder.

Tell us Intrepid Travel and your role there.

We’re an Australian-based travel company, offering over 1,000 small group adventures in 118 countries. Our mission is to be the best travel company for the world.

I work in the people team as a global learning partner, which means I am responsible for building out many of the learning programs for our people from all over the world at Intrepid.

Which journey did you submit for the JOY awards?

We use Enboarder for many things, but the one that we submitted this year was for Elevate, which is our global mentoring program. This is where senior team members mentor more junior team members. We have mentoring partnerships across 26 countries, and we had about 150 people in the program last year.

What were your goals for Elevate?

The big goal was for our people to have real-life connections through mentoring conversations, either on Teams or face to face, depending on where people were.

We needed a bank of resources that could be drip fed to participants throughout the year to keep them engaged and support them throughout the program. So whether they were veteran mentors or had never mentored before, they would have this lifeline, this email pathway that would deliver helpful resources every month, tailored to our mentees’ needs.

So we needed a flexible solution that could deliver personalized messages to many different stakeholders. In mentoring, when you’re building out resources, while you want to give something to both the mentors and the mentees, it needs to be two sides of the same coin. And also, of course, we needed to keep the direct managers of the mentees in the loop.

We also needed dashboards to see how participants were getting on, how they were completing their goals, and what we could improve about their experience in real time.

What feedback have you received from mentors and mentees in the program?

Everybody really loves the program. One thing we love about Enboarder is you can survey and gather so much data, and you get it immediately, which is so helpful for us because we can then action things really quickly.

They also love the options we provide. We offer nine topics – things like leadership, building your confidence, networking, building your personal brand, etc,. – that mentees can have every month. And now they can actually choose how long they spend learning – five, 15, or 30 minutes – and we deliver the right content blocks for them to do that. With such a diverse team globally, it’s impossible to deliver these kinds of tailored resources to individuals without a platform like Enboarder.

The most important thing we’ve heard from our mentees is the workflow enables a deeper conversation with their mentors. So it’s this beautiful synergy between those real-life relationships and that tech element that can really help set thems up for success. There are no awkward silences in the meetings, because the pathway gives plenty of options to explore each month and questions to challenge the mentees’ thinking.

How did you measure the success of the mentor program?

The cross-cultural knowledge sharing and communication skills were the most important things for us. We benchmarked our participants at the start of the program by asking, ‘How much do you know about the business?’ We gathered data to see what they felt they knew, and we also asked our mentors to rate their mentee too. Anyone’s professional development is a holistic process, and we wanted to see if mentoring had an impact on that development.

The three biggest things that came across were – one– their ability to communicate, which is huge, considering the complex nature of our matrixed global business. We’re also dealing with hundreds of thousands of customers from all over the world, as well as a 24/7 global team, so our ability to communicate well as a business is really important.

Second, their commercial acumen got better. They started having deeper conversations about things like finance and operations and how the two work together.

Third, their confidence and well-being metrics went up quite considerably throughout the program. So that was wonderful to see, and important for us to track as we continually look to develop our team members and their career goals.

Well-being became a big topic. Tell us how that came about.

Some of the ‘classic’ topics were no-brainers for us to work on, things like exploring leadership and networking better, but with so much going on in a busy business, we wanted to know how people were feeling. And what we actually saw by month six was that well-being was coming up as a topic people wanted to know more about.

So, initially, we hadn’t planned for a module about well-being or work/life balance, but this became a big feature of the second half of the program. And that’s what we loved about Enboarder, was first just having the ability to gather that information. And then within a month, all we had to do was build out a module and drag and drop it into the month’s slot that we felt was right. Without having metrics tracking how mentees were doing we wouldn’t have known that this was a big topic or that they really needed this sooner than we could have imagined.

So we created a whole piece on well-being, from little tips right through to much longer term well-being plans. And, of course, different cultures understand well-being in very different ways. So many ideas for maintaining healthy well-being came out of those mentoring conversations, and we saw a real rise in mentees’ well-being over the course of the program.

How has the journey helped mentors and mentees build connections across regions?

Oh my goodness – this is where we had no idea at the start of the program how deep this was going to go.

The biggest highlight of the program is the offline, real-life connections that this system has allowed people to have. We’re seeing people getting invited to meetings, seeing project work in the company, going to conferences like WTM (World Travel Market). Some of our Elevate alumni were even going rock climbing together. There’s just no limit really!

And this was the most heartwarming thing – to see that genuine care and connection that people had, and how much they leaned into mentoring partnerships and the value that these held.

On the whole, true connection, friendship, and solid working relationships blossomed far beyond what we thought could have originally been possible.

Which metrics are helping you measure the success of the program?

A huge portion of our mentees were promoted – 50-60% were either promoted or moved into a function that was more aligned with their career goals.

People are now building their careers in the right direction and they feel supported by their mentor, to help them set up for success.

It’s incredibly joyful being the program manager, getting that feedback, that people really care about the program, and care about each other.

What’s your advice for others building employee journeys with Enboarder?

Focus on the end user – what will help them connect with the company, with their people, and then reverse engineer everything. Build in choice to help your engagement and remember to track the data and iterate until you’ve got the best program for your team.