As every year, to close out 2021, I wanted to reflect on what our team accomplished and share with you our biggest milestones of 2021. This year was transformational for our business. We formed an official business entity, hired our first full-time employees and changed our business strategy. Despite our evolution from a community to a business in education, our main focus is to keep having an impact on people’s lives while being able to sustain our operations. Here are some highlights of what we have achieved this year.
Last year we reported that we matched 170 women with their mentors. This year we doubled that number and matched 350 people. This takes us to 500+ mentees in 2 years! We also worked on improving the program. We are now offering an option to split the payments, and network with other mentees via the Meetsy tool. For scalable operations, we built our internal tool to help us with matching the mentees with their mentors. Thanks to this tool we’re well equipped to sustain our growth.
In order to be able to find the perfect match for the mentees, we focused on recruiting mentors. Currently, our mentor database consists of 550+ mentors, from which 70% are based in the Czech Republic, and 30% are based mostly in the UK and the US. For the next year, our plan is to focus on hiring more international mentors. For the mentors, we organized a couple events thanks to our Chief Mentors such as Cristina Muntean, and Ursa Pejovnik and also introduced regular networking meetings through Meetsy. Over 200 networking meetings happened between the mentors! A special thank you goes to all the mentors who want to give back and are mentoring with us!
To help more women into leadership roles, we continued focusing on providing leadership training. This year we organized 3 cohorts of 12 people and we focused on discussing topics such as authentic leadership, how to have difficult conversations, team management and so on! Big thanks goes to the workshop leaders Simona Saskova, Renata Mrazova, Azeneth Ferrero Russell, Sarka Vernerova, Andra Crisan, Joy Baldridge, Blanka Bellak and Julia Christodoulou. In 2022, we’re planning to introduce new topics and run 3 cohorts as well.
In January 2021 we introduced a new offering - a Coaching + Mentoring program which has helped 40+ people who are not sure about their career goals by connecting them first with a coach, and then with a mentor. We’ve recruited 30+ coaches who are ready to navigate people towards their career goals and help them set SMART goals for mentoring correctly.
In November, we organized an in-person conference for 200 people in Prague! Thanks to our partners Deloitte, SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Wolt, CNC, Volkswagen Financial Services, Microsoft and Vodafone, we put together an all-day programming with focus on topics such as negotiation, hybrid work, imposter syndrome, management and leadership. The rating of 4.3 out of 5 made us happy and we know what to improve for the next year! Yes – a bigger version of our conference is coming in 2022! Have you missed the conference? You can purchase the recordings here.
“Thank you Femme Palette for organizing the conference, bringing together like- minded people from various fields and diving into interesting topics!”
- Olga Henclova, Global Learning and Talent Development at Home Credit International
As part of our Ambassador program, we helped form Women Resource Groups in companies such as Red Hat, Kiwi, Creative Dock, SAP and Publicis Groupe! Our Ambassador program lead Michaela Malatin was running this initiative and supported the other Ambassadors with content for monthly discussion topics such as self-confidence, mentoring, personal branding, imposter syndrome and more! We’re happy to share that over 100 women (and some men) across all companies were actively attending the sessions this year.
Our big focus this year was focusing on our b2b efforts. Thanks to the first pilot program that we ran in Donio, we made improvements to the program and defined our focus areas. We have enrolled in the program employees from companies such as Mews, Livesport, Storyous and Showmax. Our mentors were able to help develop talents in these companies in areas such as management/leadership or hard/soft skills. Upon popular demand, we also started offering an internal Leadership program focused on growing leaders in the company. We’re happy to announce that we have confirmed many new clients starting the next year, some of them located in the UK.
Next year will be ambitious! We’ll be establishing our presence on the UK market and will look for more expansion opportunities. Thanks to our cooperation with companies, we’re planning to announce scholarships and other impact activities. Stay tuned, more updates are coming.
Last but not least, a special thank you goes to the Femme Palette team - Ellen, Petra, Gaby, Petr, Martina, Laura, Kristina and my co-founder Klara, for their hard work making all the things mentioned above a reality!
Thank you all for following us and supporting us on this journey! We wish you happy holidays and a great start of 2022!
