Do You Conduct ‘Stay Interviews’ with Your Team?

The benefits of conducting Interviews are endless — they let you get to know people, learn about their skills, and find out about their goals and motivations. We see interviews with celebrities and sports figures (also technically celebrities) filling the media on a daily basis, and they're a big part of our professional lives as well. Why is that?

Humans are inherently social beings, and as such, we often create or refine our own opinions based on the opinions of others. Some of it also stems from curiosity; we want to know what the other side is thinking about certain issues. Interviewing has become an important aspect of human communication.

As a manager, you’re no doubt familiar with both hiring and exit interviews; but even if you conduct exit interviews, do you think you’re getting a good understanding of why your employees are leaving? More often than not, you’re probably not getting much that will help you create positive change within the organization.

Here’s where the concept of ‘stay interviews’ becomes helpful. It’s a highly effective way to communicate with your team, which, when done well, can serve as a great source of information for what is and what isn’t working, and can dramatically improve morale and turnover rates.

What is a Stay Interview and When Should You Conduct It?

To put it simply, a stay interview is asking your current employees why they work for your company, what they like about it, and what they don’t. It can be considerably more effective than an employee satisfaction survey, plus it provides a real conversation instead of a scale from 1 to 10.

Stay interviews should be done with every team member, not just the best and worst performers. If you schedule and outline them well, they will often result in valuable insights that you would otherwise never get.

When you should schedule stay interviews mostly depends on your turnover situation. If your employees are consistently leaving after six months, you may want to talk to them three months in to find out what’s happening. If you hold off until the exit interview, it’s already too late to fix anything — and you’re already losing another employee. Conversely, if turnover is low, then maybe doing them annually may be enough. But regardless of your situation, they should not be part of the annual performance review process. This is not about the employee’s performance, it’s about the performance of the company and culture. Tying the two together puts the employee in an awkward situation, where he or she may not be open enough to give you useful (and honest) information.

What to Cover?

There are several points your stay interview should include in order for the information to bring you some value:

Introduction

Start with the invitation. Mention your appreciation of their work and your best intentions to make their experience on the job as good as possible. Introduce the concept of a stay interview, so they know they’re not in any kind of trouble (sometimes a sudden request for a meeting can be very intimidating). Shoot for a friendly, informal tone. It’s just a conversation, so it should be treated as such. You should certainly be taking notes, though. This helps you to not forget anything while also making it clear that you’re really listening.

The positive factors

Do you enjoy working here, and why? What could we change to make this the best job you’ve ever had in your life? What do you perceive as the best part of your job here? Do you feel like your work is valued and appreciated? What is the one biggest obstacle the company has put in your path, recently?

Asking the right questions will not only give you insight into your employee’s personal experience, but also into the way your team is functioning within the company.

The triggers

Nobody wants to lose his employees, so try to figure out how to prevent it from happening in the first place. Identify the triggers, the holdups, and the unpleasantries that your team may be experiencing, and come up with solutions for them.

What are the reasons that you left your previous position? What’s the biggest internal problem you face in your current position? Is there anything that has been annoying you recently, and do you have a suggestion on how I can help correct that issue?

Effects and results

Of course, the last and most important step of making use of the information you’ve gathered is entirely up to you. Even if you just take the notes from these interviews and shove them in in a cabinet somewhere, you may see positive results. Just the fact of having been heard can have a strong impact on employee morale, and therefore retention. But if you really want a stay-interview strategy to be effective, you have to sit down after the fact, analyze the results across your employees, and improve everything that seems to be a common or consistent problem.

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Finally, you don’t have to call it a ‘stay interview’. You can just sit down for a cup of coffee. The important thing is to always make your intentions clear, so that the team knows that even when conducted informally, they’re still talking to you on the record — while reassuring them that this will not reflect negatively on them (and that anything they say will be anonymous). You’ll never get the truth if you put your team members in an uncomfortable position. Your main goal should be to identify what makes your people happy, and how to make sure they stay that way many years to come.

If you’d like to talk more about stay interviews, or if there’s something else I can be of assistance with, please reach out to me. I’m always happy to block off some time to connect.