Behind RISE: BlaBlaCar’s mentorship program for women

An interview of Victoria Pinto-Mesías on how BlaBlaCar created its first-ever mentorship program dedicated to the development of women across the organization.

Introduction

BlaBlaCar launched RISE in June 2022, its first-ever internal mentorship program dedicated to women. This interview of Victoria PM retraces the steps that led to creating the program. Why mentorship as a way to accelerate the development of female talent? What challenges did we face? Find all the answers below.

Who is Victoria Pinto-Mesías? Can you introduce yourself?

VPM: “I started my studies with an International Bachelor in Business Hospitality School in Switzerland. I continued then with an International Master’s degree in Human Resources Management in France and have been working in the HR field since 2017. I worked in different HR functions abroad and in France. I learned a lot but I really found my passion in “Learning & Development” (L&D)!

I started my career working in luxury hotels, but during Covid-19 I transitioned into Learning and Development at BlaBlaCar about 2 years ago. As a Talent Development Specialist, I manage learning requests for around 700 employees in more than 5 different countries: a challenge that I love!”

How did the need to train your employees through mentoring arise?

VPM: “Mentoring like coaching are subjects that fascinate me and that I value a lot. Our mentoring program has become a priority for 3 reasons:

• At BlaBlaCar, soft skills are central. Even though we are a tech company, our 2021 results showed that 60% of training completed were soft skills.
• The benefits of mentoring were evident as they were in full alignment with our values “Share More. Learn More.” and “Fail. Learn. Succeed.”. It was, therefore, an ideal way to promote our training.
• We noticed that some of our talents were renowned externally but little known internally. Mentoring was then a solution to highlight their skills and knowledge.”

Why did you choose to specifically support women in the world of tech?

VPM: “When we wanted to launch the mentoring program, we had no tool to help us deploy it. It was therefore necessary to make choices to prioritize a segment.

I wouldn’t say that we only chose to support women in tech, but that we set ourselves the goal of representing women in tech among mentees.

In tech, as in many other sectors, there is a lower proportion of women in high responsibility. In the engineering teams, the observation is even more obvious. At BlaBlaCar, we have very inspiring women in these teams. So who better than our own female leadership talents to elevate and strengthen an internal female community?”

What difficulties did you encounter in creating this program?

VPM: “As I said, we didn’t have any tools, so it represented a heavy manual workload. What was supposed to take us a few weeks took us months: presentation of the overall program, page on our intranet, visuals, photos of the mentors, impactful communications, reflection on the registration system to choose from, creation of surveys… We had to restrict the number of mentors and mentees to be able to manage the project without the right tools.”

How is the mentorship program organized?

VPM: “Our mentoring program is called RISE. I co-created it with DEI Manager Emilie Baliozian. It is an international program dedicated to the development of women at BlaBlaCar, with priority to those in the tech teams.

To begin and frame this launch, we focused on the notion of leadership. We identified it through performance reports on which we realized that it would be interesting to deepen this skill, especially through mentoring. The criteria for selecting our mentors emerged naturally: anyone who identifies as a woman, above a certain level at BlaBlaCar (based on the “Radford” scale and other BlaBlaCar specifics), and who has experience in people management. The question of diversity also appeared as a decisive criterion for us.”

What role does mentoring play in your overall training offer?

VPM: “Today mentoring promotes our values ​​in our training offer and it is something important for us. It represents 3 main objectives:

Connect: by creating a sense of community internally

Support: by providing a non-judgmental environment

Learn: by developing the skills of mentors and mentees”

What results have you seen so far?

VPM: “We had very good feedback with strong recognition from the mentors/mentees for having worked on this program. We were able to accentuate the promotion of talent internally and strengthen the BlaBlaCar community (with distance, some people had never seen each other in 2 years!).

Our first cycle was very successful, with 17 mentees matched with 13 mentors across the company and a global satisfaction score of 4.6 out of 5.

We had new requests to become mentors and many requests to be mentored. We often think that mentoring will require too much investment, but employees feel valued and participate with pleasure!”

Do you have any advice to share with companies that would like to launch a mentoring program without a lot of resources?

VPM: “It is one of the most rewarding formats. But if you choose to take care of it in total autonomy, it is really important to plan a lot of preparation time. The first impression determines a lot for the future.

We can believe that it is simple: we launch an email and the mentors and the mentees manage among themselves. But this is not the right path to follow, mentoring is much more than that. Especially if you want to evaluate performance improvements with KPIs!

Mentors can sometimes be afraid of becoming mentors and mentees can be intimidated. We have to support them and give them keys: for example, we created a RISE guide for our program with instructions, advice, templates to follow… Different content to define what mentoring is, give meaning to their first exchanges. Do not let them start on a blank page.

In addition, to thank our mentors for their involvement and their availability, they each received personalized coaching with an expert coach (4 x one hour) to best prepare for this mentor position.

It’s really an interesting experience, even as HR! I can only say one thing: go for it.”

BONUS Story

VPM: “When I started my benchmark of mentoring tools and platforms, I spoke with “Pathline”. They were amazed by all the work we did with Emilie. And the funny fact is that they created a start-up around this work: “Pathline”! We missed out on a business (laughs). They took some of my tips into consideration for their latest feature; I think that we will surely work with their tool in the long term.”

The RISE program is a success and we have now a dedicated budget for it in order to make it grow. Soon we will cast more mentors and receive new applications from mentees.

A special thanks to Emilie Baliozian for being the best partner to co-work with on this project!