Combatting the Great Resignation

As companies struggle to attract talent and improve employee retention, understanding employee feedback is more important than ever. Getting ahead of turnover saves time and money for the company while encouraging the most valuable employees to stay at their organization.

One tool your managers can add to their repertoire is a stay interview. You can think of stay interviews as exit interviews for employees who have not resigned. They are interviews designed so you can get to the heart of what’s troubling people before an exit interview is called for. In a stay interview, managers speak with current employees to get feedback on what they like about their job and working at the company, and what can be improved.

Despite the formal name, stay interviews are normally short, informal, semi-regular meetings between a direct manager and their report. Importantly, they should focus on engagement, retention feedback, communication, and concerns.

Five Steps to a Stay Interview

As with any other new addition to your company, it is important to create a strong strategy before implementation. Before you introduce a stay interview to your team add these five tips to your strategy…

1. Involve Leadership

Leadership at the top of the organization, with HR’s help, should set the tone and conduct interviews with their direct reports. The process should continue down the chain of command and each front-line supervisor should interview their employees.

2. All Employees

All workers in the company, whether onsite or remote, should have the opportunity to have that one-on-one call with their supervisor. The purpose of stay interviews is to catch problems before an employee feels they have to leave. This can only be effective if each employee gets a chance to discuss.

3. Expectations

One challenge of a stay interview is to set expectations with the employee. The employee must know that the manager can only influence certain areas of the company, and how the interview will reflect that. It should also be made clear to employees that the interview will not reflect negatively on them, it encourages truthful and accurate responses.

4. Be Prepared

Before conducting any conversation, managers should be prepared with a script to open the meeting and the questions they would like to ask. This will help keep meetings consistent between employees and help managers feel ready to chat.

5. Leave Performance at the Door

Stay interviews should focus on how the manager can better retain employees, instead of how the employee is or is not meeting expectations. Performance reviews are a necessary part of any organization but should be saved for a different time and place.

Struggling with employee turnover? Is a stay interview the right move for your retention strategy?

The best way to improve turnover is to better understand your employees, their experience, and to stop issues before they can occur. 

We can help you create a comprehensive plan to reduce your staff coming and going rate, including a stay interview customized to your needs.

Schedule a call today!

Six Stay Interview Questions to Increase Employee Retention

1.  Are you able to maintain a positive work-life balance?
2. How much do you look forward to Fridays?
3. Do you dread Mondays?
4. What do you like most about working at this company? Least?
5. What are your favorite projects to work on? Least favorite?
6. Have you been provided with enough development opportunities?

Build Your Stay Interview Plan to Increase Employee Retention

The first step to implementing a stay interview is to create a plan. Involving HR will help pinpoint what questions you want to include and how to roll out your new strategy to managers. In some cases, it may also be best for HR to conduct the interviews. Interest in setting up stay interviews? CYB Human Resources can help prepare you and your managers.

Schedule a call today!