Stay Interviews: A Powerful Employee Engagement and Retention Tool

OVERVIEW

The best way to find out what your employees want and how to retain them is to ask them.

• Ask questions to gauge how you’re meeting your employees’ expectations. Not just “How’s it going?”, but specific questions to get specific answers
• Explore why these people remain with your company.
• Why did they join the organization?
• How well are their objectives or dreams being fulfilled?
• Which aspects of their work do they enjoy the most?
• Which do they least enjoy?
• Are they receiving sufficient opportunities for growth and development?
• What would influence them to look elsewhere?

The stay interview is a one-on-one interview between a manager and a valued employee. Its aim, quite simply, is to learn what makes employees want to keep working for you. Likewise, it's designed to elicit what might motivate them to leave. In an effective 30-Minutestay interview, managers ask standard, structured questions in a casual and conversational manner. It’s not a performance discussion but rather a “let me get to know you and your goals” discussion.

WHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND

A recent Harvard Business Review article ‘How to Keep Your Top Talent’ warns that 25% of your top talent plans to jump ship in the next year. The results for engagement and effort are even more alarming, since about a third of employees surveyed admit to phoning it in at work. That’s bad news if you believe that staying competitive relies on the passion, drive and creative energy of talented people.

Many companies use exit interviews to find out why employees are leaving their jobs. Unfortunately, asking an employee on their last day “why are you leaving?” doesn’t provide useful information in time to prevent the turnover. A superior approach is a “stay interview.”because it occurs before there is any hint that an employee is about to exit the firm.

A stay interview helps managers understand why employees stay so that those important factors can be reinforced. They also signal frustrations that can be nipped in the bud before they drive the employee to start looking elsewhere.

The Benefits of Stay Interviews:

• They engage the employee: Most employees are excited simply by the fact that the organization is concerned about their future and that their manager took the time to consult with them.
• They’re individualized: Unlike engagement surveys and many other retention tools that are focused on what excites a large number of employees, this approach is customized to a single identifiable individual and their wants.
• They are inexpensive: These informal interviews don’t require a budget. In most cases, a half to an hour of a manager and an employee’s time are the only major cost factors.

Adding stay interviews to your engagement and strategies can help your organization retain critical employees. It’s the single best tool you can give managers.

AREAS COVERED

The areas that will be covered are:

• Identify five key factors that impact an employee’s desire to stay or leave
• Recognize four possible “triggers” that cause the employee to consider leaving
• Learn how to ask probing questions and conduct effective, efficient stay interviews
• Survey a list of eight retention actions to increase employee’s loyalty and commitment
• Review a sample of stay interview questions and develop your own customized list to ask
• Discover how to develop stay plans for your employees and manage accountability
• Develop a simple “how-to-toolkit” that includes who to select, how and when to approach; interview formant and how to handle possible resistance

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Learn how the stay interview works as an opportunity to build trust with employees and a chance to assess the degree of employee satisfaction and engagement that exists in a department or company. Also understand how it provides the manager with the opportunity to quickly reinforce the positives and deal with the employee’s concerns before they turn into real dissatisfaction.

WHO WILL BENEFIT

• COO’s
• CFO’s
• VP of Human Resources
• Human Resource Professionals
• Chief Learning Officer
• Directors
• Project Managers
• Operation Managers and Supervisors
• Team Leaders
• Staff Managers and Supervisors