Retaining top talent is a priority for every organization. What is a stay interview and why should you start doing them?
All organizations conduct new hire interviews and many conduct exit interviews. Waiting for someone to leave to learn what you could have done better is a lost opportunity. This is why stay interviews can be helpful. You should conduct one stay interview annually but do not conduct it during the annual performance review. What a stay interview is not is begging someone to stay after they have resigned. Stay interviews should be done before the employee reaches the point of turning in their resignation. Retaining someone who expresses a desire to leave usually doesn’t result in long-term success.
A stay interview is a periodic structured retention interview between a manager and a highly-valued employee. It identifies and reinforces key factors that would drive them to stay with you. It also identifies and minimizes past triggers that have caused them to resign from other positions.
Limit stay interview to your high-performing contributors. These are the employees who would seriously set you back if they were to leave. Key employees have intimate knowledge of your organizations processes and technology. That tribal knowledge cannot be easily trained. Limiting your stay interview to key employees keeps your effort highly focused and minimizes the time spent on retention.
The Top 7 Benefits of a Stay Interviews
- Includes actions: Both the manager and the employee identify actions that will improve the overall employee experience. These actions also eliminate frustrations and turnover triggers. You proactively change those things that have made their job harder. You through those things they feel devalue their efforts.
- Reduce anxiety: The stay interview happens before the employee has reached their breaking point the anxiety for them to leave is eliminated.
- Reduces management anxiety: Since the employee is not yet looking for a job or resigned, management isn’t desperate to hire, train and ramp-up a replacement.
- Focuses on the positives: A majority of the interview focuses on the reasons the employee has stayed so far. It deeply covers all the aspects of the job that they really enjoy. Use a solution-focused mindset for the negative factors that come up. When your employees know you understand what is bothering them about the job and that you are actively working to fix those things their tolerance for them will increase temporarily.
- Reaffirm employee commitment and engagement: The stay interview will provide you will low-cost changes that will help reaffirm the employees commitment and engagement to the organization.
- Identify triggers that cause them to leave: The stay interview will help you identify the reasons that have caused them to leave their past employers and helps you to not repeat those things.
With the best stay interview you will be able to identify early warning signs that a key employee needs more support or direction. The stay interview will provide ways to retain the top talent who contribute the most and whom you have invested a lot of time and resources in.
Continue on to part two of the Stay Interview for questions to consider using when conducting your stay interview.
Last updated on April 11th, 2018 at 05:10 pm
