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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

If you are waiting for an employee to submit their resignation before asking questions, you are too late. Once an employee has decided to leave, they are mentally checked out.

THE EXIT INTERVIEW IS DEAD

• You won’t get honest feedback

• Most employees will decline an exit interview

• It’s reactive instead of proactive

If you are serious about improving their retention, you need to get proactive in your approach.

How?

By implementing Stay Interviews (I think the term Stay Interview is just a buzzword, but we will use it anyway).

What is a Stay Interview?

A stay interview is a tool organizations use to gauge why their (high-performing) employees are staying with them. It’s a rather informal conversation between a manager and an employee in which the former asks the latter a predetermined set of questions.

Unlike the term stay interview suggests, it’s not meant to keep employees from leaving, at least not primarily. It’s more about gathering valuable feedback from your employees and continuously improving employee satisfaction and engagement.

Stay interviews differ from exit interviews in various ways. The most obvious difference lies in the timing of the interview. An exit interview takes place after an employee has resigned, while a stay interview is conducted with current employees.

Why Should You Conduct Stay Interviews?

I’ll give you three solid reasons why conducting stay interviews is worth your time and energy.

Improving Employee Retention

When asking the right questions, a stay interview can give you tremendous insight into what people love about working for your organization – and what can be improved.

Let’s say, for example, that 7 out of 10 interviewees feel like they’re not getting enough recognition for their work. Implementing a simple employee and/or peer recognition program might be enough to solve this issue, boost employee engagement, and, by extension, improve your employee retention rate.

Getting valuable feedback

Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion is an often-heard quote. And for a good reason, since it holds for so many things, including your employee experience.

You may think that you know exactly why people love working for your company; their awesome colleagues, challenging projects, great culture, or maybe even all of the above.

But in reality, your employees want to stay because of the flexibility they get, the autonomy to make decisions, and the opportunities the company gives them for professional development.

The fact of the matter is, you simply don’t know until you ask them. So before you start doubling down on something you think people want, it’s best to gather their feedback during a stay interview

Boosting employee satisfaction & engagement

Stay interviews can be a useful engagement strategy. They allow you to identify pain points and areas of improvement before they become reasons for people to start looking for greener pastures.

There are, however, two conditions for the ‘stay interview engagement strategy’ to work:

• There needs to be a trusting relationship between the manager and the team member if the latter is to honestly talk about what doesn’t work for them.

• You’ll need to act on the feedback you gather during the stay interviews and change things. Otherwise, people will end up disengaged rather than engaged.

How Should You Go About Having These Conversations?

Let’s take a look at some of the practical aspects of conducting a stay interview. Who should be doing it? How long does it take? When is the best time for an interview?

Here is your roadmap -

• Start small. You don’t have to conduct stay interviews with every single employee. Focus on your long-term, high performers, and high potentials to begin with.

• Make stay interviews a regular activity. Regular can mean different things to different companies, but we’d say try to conduct a stay interview at least once a year.

• Determine when the interview will take place. There are a few things to keep in mind here. For starters, it doesn’t make much sense to conduct a stay interview with an employee who just started working for your organization; they’re not fully settled into their role and the company yet. Also, don’t add the stay interview to people’s performance reviews but have them as a separate activity. Lastly, try to schedule all stay interviews within a relatively short period. This will allow you to gather all the feedback and, if necessary, act upon it without leaving it unaddressed for too long.

• Decide who will lead the stay interview. It makes sense for managers to conduct these interviews since they probably have a stronger, more trusting relationship with the people in their team than HR. However, if it’s the manager, bear in mind that they might need to receive a short training on how to hold a stay interview.

• Schedule enough time. Typically, a stay interview lasts between 30 minutes to 1 hour.

• Structure the interview. Create a stay interview template so that each manager follows the same structure and each employee gets asked the same questions.

• Ask relevant questions. As obvious as this may seem, it’s also the core of an effective stay interview. We’ll list some example questions in next week’s newsletter.

• Gather all answers in the same place. Eventually, the information gathered during the stay interviews will have to be analyzed if you want to be able to take action.

• Summarize. Before they wrap up the interview, managers should summarize the employee’s key reasons for staying or leaving to avoid misunderstandings (you can add this to your stay interview template so you won’t forget).

• Look for patterns and trends. Do you detect any reasons why employees stay or leave multiple times? Identify these. This will help you find ways to strengthen the positive and reduce the negative factors.

• Take action! An exclamation point is in order here. Stay interviews can be instrumental in keeping your employees happy, and increasing loyalty and mission commitment. But, and this is a big but, only if you take their feedback seriously and act when necessary.

The Questions Types

We will save this information for next week’s newsletter! We have a list of 21 questions to share with you! Stay tuned!

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