Case Study: Compass Group
The Challenge
The Challenge
Eurest and ESFM, divisions of Compass Group, operate across numerous client locations nationwide. Eurest delivers food services and ESFM provides integrated facilities management to the business and industry (B&I) sector. This widespread operational footprint led to a recurring challenge: how to foster meaningful connection and support professional development among managers scattered across different regions, many of whom worked in isolated environments.
According to Kelly Pope, Onboarding and Development Program Manager at Eurest, managers consistently expressed a desire for more support and connection. They wanted mentorship—not just in the traditional sense of career coaching, but also in the form of peer-to-peer support to troubleshoot daily challenges, share best practices, and feel a sense of community within a vast organization.
Previous attempts to deliver on this need faced roadblocks. Earlier iterations of the mentoring program either lacked structure or were too rigid. One version centered on mentoring circles—predefined groups led by selected mentors. While initially successful, scheduling group sessions across varied time zones and availability proved cumbersome. Another approach tried to democratize access by allowing one-on-one mentoring with minimal structure using a lightweight tool, but it failed to generate sustained engagement due to a lack of features like calendar integration and automated reminders
The Solution
Recognizing the complexity of managing such programs manually, Compass Group partnered with Together, a structured mentorship and peer learning platform. The decision was driven by two core needs: the capability to scale mentorship through a centralized platform, and the need for a true partner to support implementation and long-term evolution.
The Together platform supported them with:
- User-led matching with customizable match rules and profile fields (e.g. region, tenure, skills)
- Integrated scheduling with Outlook and Microsoft Teams, ensuring that sessions appear in users' calendars
- Pre-built resources like discussion guides and meeting agendas to reduce prep time and enhance engagement
- Automated nudges and reminders, ensuring sessions stay on track
- Robust reporting tools for tracking participation, satisfaction, and usage metrics
Just as importantly, Together provided ongoing strategic support. A dedicated Customer Success Manager from Together met regularly with Kelly to review performance, brainstorm solutions to challenges, and help with custom reporting exports for internal stakeholders.
Together enabled Compass Group to reimagine mentorship with flexibility at its core. After surveying past participants to better understand what “mentorship” meant to them, Compass Group designed two distinct yet complementary programs within the platform:
The Results
The shift to Together’s platform marked a turning point for Compass Group’s mentorship strategy. By offering multiple paths to participation and automating the administrative heavy-lifting, Compass Group achieved significant results in program engagement and organizational impact.
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