businesspartner

“We are in the business of helping people make sound decisions. SAYes is doing just that for the next generation.” 

– Netto Invest

Business teams empowered and empowering through mentorship.

  • INVESTMENT
  • YOU DEFINE THE TERMS OF YOUR SUPPORT

SAYes Mentoring has been offering real world experience and scientific excellence in mentoring and behaviour change since 2008. We exist to end social poverty. We provide expert training, programming, support, and online tools for virtual volunteering, specifically e-mentoring. Our Social Change Programmes connect business teams and independent volunteers with under-served young people globally, achieving high impact personal and professional growth for mentors and mentees. Our Partner Programmes for corporates are built to deliver the skills, values and vision of purpose leadership to your business teams, while also achieving powerful employee engagement and social and community impact benefits. Read more about purpose leadership, employee engagement and social and community impact below, or complete the form below.

    Unlock social purpose with behavioural science

    The potential of a purpose-driven team is enormous. Great business leaders skilfully align competencies and values with vision, inspiring the creation of products and services that matter. Yet while 85% of execs and upper management are ‘living their purpose at work’ only 15% of frontline managers and employees feel the same way. These are not just slightly less inspired or neutral employees. Nearly half (49%) disagree that purpose features in their day-to-day work at all. The purpose gap translates into poorer outcomes in resilience, loyalty, and productivity and also to poorer quality of life outcomes. This is true even for employees who say their work is ‘’just a job”. A sense of purpose really does matter, perhaps now more than ever. Yet initiatives to enhance purpose regularly fall flat. Posters on a wall, ad hoc teambuilding, shallow corporate training or isolated coaching sessions are not nearly enough to inspire purpose-driven leadership, creativity or connection.

    Our Mentorship training is designed to bring together the skills, values and vision required to lead teams with social purpose. Leadership and management teams are taught to understand and contextually apply evidence-based expertise from the behavioural and social sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, skilfully led by experienced and highly qualified facilitators. The course includes best practice and innovation in the role of mentoring and transition planning, the use of advanced tools, tactics and strategies for behavioural and perspective change, and a thorough understanding of the impact of social poverty. We have 100% 5 star reviews for our mentor training course. We offer standard (as standalone) as well as customised (for Partner Programmes) training options.

    Our customised training adds personal engagement with each participant prior to the course, through an online evaluation (including psychometric assessment) and a one-to-one interview with a SAYes transition specialist. Customised training is designed to be applied in the context of community mentoring, and therefore also includes extensive coverage of programme policies and procedures, safeguarding and relevant (mentee) population context.

    Sub-par growth opportunities, lack of visibility and access to career opportunities (including those outside of their immediate region or function), or simply “I feel like I can’t develop my career here anymore” are regularly cited as among the leading reasons for talent turnover. Combined with a wave of ‘purpose and work/life resignations’ the urgency to launch impactful employee engagement initiatives is especially pressing.

    Employees want to connect with each other and with their communities in personally and professionally meaningful ways. This insight is relevant to talent retention, to recruitment and to the onboarding of new hires – and it is also relevant to core business. Indeed, distributed and remote ways of working alongside gig economy dynamics increasingly present a case for ensuring employees are able to access and realise as many adjacent opportunities as possible. Isolation within functional or regional silos is not only demotivating it also gets in the way of creative collaboration and connection through the ‘adjacently possible’. The costs to company innovation and culture are severe, and increasingly foreground questions around what counts as internally as well as externally inclusive communities.

    Employee volunteerism can be a huge part of effective and inclusive engagement, especially when combined with opportunities for building skills, visibility and access. Recognition and feedback across levels and teams is especially valuable in empowering employees to take ownership of their own personal and professional growth – an important factor in future proofing any workforce. Yet all too often, volunteer initiatives appear superficial, tokenistic and disconnected from the company ecosystem. This is unfortunate because virtual volunteering, and e-mentoring especially, can provide almost frictionless, yet hugely impactful personal and professional growth to employees, while at the same time reaching into under-served communities across the globe. Mentoring is a largely unrealised opportunity for social change as well as for employee engagement. We firmly believe e-mentoring can be harnessed for social change at scale, while also providing organisations with the meaningful growth opportunities that they want for their teams.

    SAYes offers Partner Programmes to corporates, linking transition programming – through virtual volunteering/e-mentoring – to social and community impact initiatives that your company wishes to support. Various levels of programme customisation are available, depending on the recruitment (versus nomination) and training of beneficiary (mentee) groups, the programme design and programme support requested.

    We have built partner programmes with corporate teams from around the world and amazing groups of young people (aged between 14 and 32 years) in the UK and South Africa. We have extensive experience with care experienced young people, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBTQI+ youth, first time job seekers, interns, sport for development coaches, youth in conflict with the law, teenage parents, youth-headed households, youth in foster care, high school students, students on scholarships, university students, youth change-makers, youth with mental health challenges, and youth with special needs and disabilities.

    Intersect diversity, inclusivity and equality through effective altruism

    We exist to end social poverty. Whatever your charitable commitments, if you are not addressing social poverty, you are undermining the impact of your support. SAYes provides effective, inclusive, and professionally managed social and community impact initiatives, designed to enhance and compound material support through powerful behavioural and perspective change. We are sensitive to the many ways in which sentiment-based initiatives can create incentives which disempower and exploit under-served young people, reinforcing inequalities and furthering divisions. We are determined to apply principles from science and business to improve the bottom line of philanthropy, and raise the quality of the conversations, the practice and the research in social change. Our Partner Programmes allow companies to align their philanthropic vision with evidence-based, structured and supported programming delivered tractably, sustainably and at scale.

    SAYes is a Charitable Company registered with the Charity Commission and Companies House in the UK, and a Registered Trust, Non-profit Organisation (NPO), Public Benefit Organisation (PBO), and Section 18a in South Africa. We support our social change programmes through a combination of;
    • Donations & Grants: From philanthropists and foundations who share our vision of doing good better
    • Nominal Programme Fees: From independent volunteer mentors
    •Partnerships: From business propositions including training courses, partner programmes, and consultancy

    Donations and supported social change partnerships are tax exempt and eligible for Individual & Corporate Gift AID in the UK, and (along with staff volunteer time) score B-BBEE points in South Africa.