Stay Interviews: A Powerful Engagement and Retention Tool
Learn to plan and run stay interviews that reveal what keeps your best employees engaged, and follow through with actions that reduce unwanted turnover.
Speaker
Melveen Stevenson
HR consultant and executive coach · M.S. Elemental, LLC · SHRM-SCP
Overview
Most companies learn why good people leave through exit interviews, which comes too late to change anything. Stay interviews let managers act before an employee decides to go. This 60-minute stay interviews training shows how to build them into your retention strategy.
A stay interview helps you find what engages and excites high performers, so you can build on it, and what frustrates them, so you can reduce or remove it. You'll learn the parts of an effective stay interview strategy, how to set goals and commitments first, how to prepare for the first conversation, which questions get useful answers, and how to follow through.
The session also explains why stay interviews work: they are personal, focused on key employees, action-oriented and inexpensive.
Why attend: High performers who feel disconnected from their managers, colleagues or work start looking elsewhere, often without warning. Giving them a way to share their views helps you hold on to them, cut replacement costs and keep continuity in your team. This session suits C-level leaders, CHROs and chief learning officers, directors, project and operations managers, supervisors, team leaders and HR professionals at all levels.
What’s covered
- Components of an effective stay interview strategy
- Setting your goals and commitments before you begin
- Setting up and preparing for the first stay interview
- Insightful questions to ask
- Best practices for following through
Who should attend
What you get
About the speaker
Melveen Stevenson is the CEO and founder of M.S. Elemental, LLC, a human resources and business advisory firm. As a certified HR professional with a background in accounting and finance, she helps companies to navigate the human resources “jungle” of compliance, human capital, and leadership challenges. In doing so, she empowers companies to strengthen their infrastructure from the inside out, specifically through leadership development, operations, training, employee engagement, and executive coaching.
Melveen speaks on key topics to empower companies with the latest research and best practices for increasing engagement, enhancing leadership presence, and optimizing diverse workforce groups.
Over the last 20 years, Melveen has held leadership positions in human resources operations, supply chain, and talent management at international companies in food manufacturing, medical devices, and consumer products. She has spent most of her career in California, and has expertise in the state’s complicated employment regulations.
Melveen is certified through the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM-SCP) and the Human Resources Certification Institute (SPHR). She is also a faculty member at California State University-Dominguez Hills.

