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More stay interviews lead to less exit interviews. Stick to these tips to make sure yours produce actionable feedback.
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There are plenty of tools at your disposal when it comes to solving the employee retention challenge.
But one the most underutilized is stay interviews, with just 28% of organizations conducting them.
Here’s everything you need to know to get the most from this often overlooked tool for fixing a high staff turnover.
A stay interview is a one-to-one interview you conduct with a top performing employee to find out what engages them about their work – and to get an idea about what might make them jump ship.
While it’s the close cousin of the tried-and-tested exit interview, the purpose of a stay interview isn't to convince an outgoing employee not to leave. Instead, they’re for getting honest feedback from your top employees on what you’re doing right – and what you're not doing so well – so you can improve things.
Stay interviews come with a whole host of research-backed benefits. Start conducting them with your best employees and they’ll help you:
Increasing employee retention is top of mind for most businesses in 2023. And stay interviews are a proven way to reduce turnover rates.
In fact, nearly 2 in 5 job leavers who didn’t have a stay interview say it would have made an impact on whether or not they left.
A surefire way to have your most talented teammates heading for the exit is to leave them uncomfortable opening up about how they honestly feel about their work.
One of the big reasons stay interviews are so effective at retaining your top staff is that they give your people a voice. In fact, 76% of workers that have had a stay interview say their manager fostered an environment where they could express feelings or frustrations, compared to just 47% in workplaces without them.
Replacing outgoing employees is expensive business.
Firstly, the direct cost of replacing an outgoing employee has been estimated at 20% of their salary. Factor indirect costs like lost productivity, the effect on team morale, and the time it will take their replacement to get up to speed into that and you might dread to think how much it will cost to replace each outgoing member of staff.
The kicker? 52% of voluntarily departing employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.
Conducting stay interviews and acting on the feedback you get from them is an incredibly effective way of holding on to your top employees. That makes it one of the most cost-effective retention strategies at your disposal when you consider the amount it saves you in recruitment costs.
Because your leaders are removed from your business’s day-to-day operations, they only get an insight into a sliver of its problems. In fact, it’s been estimated that the C-suite is only aware of 4% of all their business’s problems.
But between them, your front-line staff are collectively aware of 100% of your company’s problems. They’re the ones dealing with them every day, after all.
Stay interviews will go a long way to revealing that hidden 96% of issues to your leaders. And once you know what headaches your people are dealing with, you can address them.
74% of staff who feel listened to by their employer are more engaged at work and effective in their role.
Which is why complementing your engagement surveys with stay interviews is like throwing rocket fuel on your engagement levels.
Plus, while there are certainly differences between engagement and retention, they’re closely tied. Boosting one tends to boost the other.
Not all stay interviews are created equal. Stick to these tips to make sure yours have the biggest impact on your retention rates:
The first step to effective stay interviews starts long before you start scheduling them with your teammates.
Because the truth is: your employees will only open up about how they honestly feel about their job if you put the effort into cultivating a company culture that leaves them feeling comfortable doing so.
If you feel like your employees are guarded during their stay interviews then there’s no overnight fix. You’re going to have to go back to the drawing board with your company culture.
A stay interview isn’t about how well your employee is doing – it’s about how well your organization is doing. So, don’t fall into the trap of turning your stay interviews into performance reviews – leave it for when annual reviews roll around.
Putting what you like and don’t like about your job into words often requires a bit of introspection. Which is why you’ll get the most actionable feedback from your employees if you let them know what questions you’re going to be asking them in advance.
Ask your team members to take a leap of faith and share their honest thoughts with you then fail to act on their feedback and you could seriously damage the trust they have in you.
On the other hand, if your employees see you’re willing to listen to them and fix the problems they flag, they’re a lot more likely to open up about more problems – and encourage their teammates to do the same. That helps kick off a virtuous cycle that will ultimately lead to much higher employee engagement and retention rates.
These questions will help you quickly paint a picture of the things an employee likes and doesn’t like about their job:
Asking this directly will help you get straight into what they enjoy about working for your company. Asking follow-up questions about their responses can help you dig deeper into the specifics for even more actionable feedback.
If people don’t feel like they're growing in their job and moving towards a promotion (no matter how far down the line), they’re not likely to stick around for very long. In fact, 41% of people leave jobs because of the lack of career progression opportunities.
Sure, we all need to pay the bills. But there are plenty of places your top performers could make ends meet. Asking them to reflect on why they choose to work for your company specifically will give you insights into what aspects of your company culture you should be doubling down on.
The kind of employees you want to keep on your payroll are going to be ambitious. So, it’s only natural that they’ll think about leaving every now and then. You can get a sense of what might tempt them away from your organization – or drive them out of it – if you get their candid answers to this question.
Asking your employees a broad question like this will give them the chance to tell you what they want from their role they’re not getting, what they get frustrated by, and what they want to see more of. And that can be invaluable information when it comes to reducing your turnover.
The bottom line is: more stay interviews lead to less exit interviews. Stick to the tips we’ve laid out here to make sure yours produce as much actionable feedback as possible.
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