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 dissatisfied and contemplating leaving their jobs for greener pastures. That can lead to a lot of exit interviews”. However, 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.

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.

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 3 benefits and challenges of stay interviews for your organization.
• Learn how to ask probing questions and conduct effective, efficient stay interviews.
• Discover how to develop stay plans for your employees and manage accountability.
• Survey a list of retention actions to increase employee loyalty and commitment.
• Review a “how-to-to-toolkit”: Who to select, the timing and frequency, the interview format, the 3 important questions to ask, and the 6 best practices.

High turnover can be costly for organizations in terms of recruitment, onboarding, and training expenses. Utilizing stay interviews to address issues proactively may potentially diminish turnover, resulting in cost savings. Stay interviews are instrumental in comprehending and overseeing employee satisfaction and retention. Proactively addressing concerns and cultivating robust relationships with employees enables organizations to foster a more positive and productive workplace.