Stay Interviews: A Powerful and Low-Cost Employee Engagement and Retention Tool

A recent LinkedIn news article titled "Exit Interview, Meet Stay Interview” states:
“Scores of people are leaving jobs for greener pastures. That's a lot of exit interviews. While the Great Reshuffle is upon us, and looks to continue well into 2023, a new kind of interview is growing in popularity - the stay interview. It's a conversation not focused on reasons for quitting, but rather on why workers are staying put. It's part of an effort to "dial up retention efforts during the record turnover."

Do you want to dial up your retention efforts? Adding stay interviews to your engagement and retention strategies will help your organization retain your critical talent so they won’t be motivated to seek out greener pastures.  It’s the single best tool you can give managers. The benefits are:

• They motivate the employee: They’re 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 personalized: Unlike surveys and many other retention tools that are primarily focused on what excites many employees, this approach is customized to a single identifiable individual and their needs and wants.
• They include actions: Unlike exit interviews, which only identify problems, stay interviews also encourage the parties to identify actions that can improve the employee experience and actions that can help eliminate any major turnover triggers.

Adding stay interviews to your engagement and retention strategies can help your organization retain critical employees.  This webinar will include these learning objectives:

• Recognize possible “triggers” that cause employees to consider leaving.
• Identify the three benefits and challenges of stay interviews for your organization.
• Learn how to ask probing questions and conduct effective, efficient stay interviews.
• 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.
• Survey a list of retention actions to increase employee loyalty and commitment.
• Study a “how-to-toolkit”: Who to select, the timing and frequency, the interview format, and ways to respond to an employee’s request for a raise or promotion.

Are your top talent engaged? Do they feel committed to the work they are doing? Do they brag about your company to others as a great place to work?

The best way to find out what your employees think and how to retain them is to ask them. Not just “How’s it going?”, but specific questions to get specific answers. Its aim, quite simply, is to learn what motivates your top talent employees to continue working for you and 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?

Therefore, stay interviews will help managers and leaders understand their talent's goals and how to ensure they will continue to be engaged and excited about their jobs. It will help managers understand why these employees stay so that those important factors can be reinforced. It will also signal their frustrations which then can be nipped in the bud before they drive the employee to start looking elsewhere. Finally, the stay interview becomes an opportunity to continue to build trust with your talent and a chance to assess the degree of satisfaction and engagement that exists within your department or team.

• CEOs
• COOs
• VP of Human Resources
• Chief Learning Officers
• Directors
• Project Managers
• Operation Managers and Supervisors
• Team Leaders
• Human Resources Professionals

Marcia Zidle is a board certified executive coach, business management consultant and keynote speaker, who works with organizations to leverage their leadership and human capital assets that results in higher performance and profitability.

She has 25 years of management, business consulting and international experience in a variety of industries and brings an expertise in social and emotional intelligence; executive and team leadership; employee engagement and innovation; personal and organization change management.

She has been selected one of LinkedIn Profinder’s top leadership and career coaches for 2016& 2017!