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Your organization might have a great group benefits plan, optimized onboarding procedures, and clearly-mapped career development paths, but if you’re finding that retention is a challenge, there might be something missing.
Instead of adding a complex program into the mix, there’s a tactic that your organization can use that can be easily and seamlessly integrated. This tactic is the stay interview.
Stay interviews are exactly as the name suggests: interviewing employees to uncover ways to help them stay at your organization. They give insight into the employee’s experience, and ultimately, reveal ideas for how you can keep employees most engaged.
Stay interviews are flexible, and can work for every organization. Despite containing the word “interview,” stay interviews can be anything from an informal chat to a more structured conversation.
Employee turnover is costly. According to Gallup, the expense of an employee’s exit can amount to between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. If an employee has a base salary of $80K, that means their departure could have a $40K or up to $160K impact on your bottom line. This can quickly add up with the exits of multiple employees.
So why are stay interviews the secret to successfully retaining employees who might otherwise be at-risk of leaving? It’s because they help the employee feel valued, while gathering valuable information for your organization.
In short, the key benefits of stay interviews can be summed up with the acronym STAY:
S – Shows employees they and their contributions and ideas are all valued
T – Takes time to foster trust and open the lines of communication
A – Assesses employee’s satisfaction and fit within position, team, and with leadership
Y – Yields actionable information and insights from employees to enhance engagement
We recommend two simple and different methods to prompt the scheduling of a stay interview: the timing method and the behaviour method
The timing method aligns the scheduling of stay interviews based on employee tenure, with a stay interview cadence that includes:
The behaviour method is more qualitative and looks to employee behaviour as the cue to schedule a stay interview. It requires people managers to be particularly attuned to their direct reports’ behaviour, spotting unexpected changes like:
The great thing about stay interviews is that they don’t need to be a formal event. In fact, stay interviews can even be a few questions tacked onto a regularly scheduled 1:1. It’s also acceptable and appropriate to call a stay interview, a stay interview. It shouldn’t feel like a covert operation where we’re trying to hide our intentions. It should be explicit because it will help employees feel valued and encourage more open dialogue.
Deciding who will run stay interviews at your organization depends on a variety of factors (which we at First30 can help you navigate), but most commonly the people who will hold the stay interviews are:
No matter who runs the stay interview, ensuring confidentiality is critical.
We all know that when we’re conducting an exit interview, it’s too late; the employee has already decided to leave. Instead, leverage stay interviews to gather employee feedback, take action on it, and keep your employees engaged.
No matter who runs the stay interview, ensuring confidentiality is critical.
We all know that when we’re conducting an exit interview, it’s too late; the employee has already decided to leave. Instead, leverage stay interviews to gather employee feedback, take action on it, and keep your employees engaged.
If you’re interested in integrating stay interviews into your employee retention strategy, and are looking for support or facilitation in implementing them at your organization, we can help! Feel free to send us an email any time!
