Stay Interviews: A Powerful and Low-Cost Employee Engagement and Retention Tool

Global Wizdom is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDCs) for SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP. This program is valid for 1 PDC for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP.

Key Take-Away:
Adding stay interviews to your engagement and retention strategies can help your organization retain critical employees and your top talent. It’s the single best tool you can give managers.

Overview:
A recent Harvard Business Review article ‘How to Keep Your Top Talent’ warns that 25% of your top talent plans to jump ship in the next year. It also found one in three admits to not putting all their effort into their jobs. This should be alarming to companies who believe that their competitiveness relies on the passion, drive, and creative energy of their talented people.

Many companies use exit interviews to find out why employees are leaving their jobs. Unfortunately, asking an employee on their last day “why are you leaving?” doesn’t provide useful information in time to prevent the turnover.

A superior approach is a “stay interview.” because it occurs before there is any hint that an employee is about to exit the firm. They help understand why employees stay so that those important factors can be reinforced. They also signal frustrations that can be nipped in the bud before they drive the employee to start looking elsewhere. Additional benefits are:
•  They’re personalized: Unlike engagement surveys and many other retention tools that are focused on what excites a large number of employees, this approach is focused on a single individual.
•  They include actions: Unlike exit interviews, which only identify problems, stay interviews will identify actions that can improve the employee experience and eliminate major turnover triggers
•  They are inexpensive: These informal interviews don’t require a budget. In most cases, a half to an hour of a manager and an employee’s time is the only major cost factors.

Why Should You Attend:
The best way to find out what your employees want and how to retain them is to ask them. Not just “How’s it going?”,

Rather, explore what motivates your people. Why did they join 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 there opportunities for growth and development? What would influence them to look elsewhere?

The stay interview is an opportunity to build trust with employees and a chance to assess the degree of employee engagement. Stay interviews are preferable to employee satisfaction surveys because they:
•  Provide a two-way conversation and a chance to ask questions,
•  Get a more in-depth understanding of that employee’s current motivation
•  Offer managers the opportunity to quickly reinforce the positives and deal with the employee’s concerns.

Areas Covered in the Session:
•  Identify five key factors that impact an employee’s desire to stay or leave
•  Recognize four possible “triggers” that cause the employee to consider leaving
•  Learn how to ask probing questions and conduct effective, efficient stay interviews
•  Survey a list of eight retention actions to increase employee’s loyalty and commitment
•  Review a sample of stay interview questions and develop your own customized list to ask
•  Discover how to develop stay plans for your employees and manage accountability
•  Develop a simple “how-to-toolkit” that includes who to select, how and when to approach; interview formant and how to handle possible resistance

Speaker: Marcia Zidle
Marcia Zidle, with a Master’s Degree in Organization Effectiveness, is a board-certified executive coach, business management consultant, and keynote speaker, who helps organizations to leverage their leadership and human capital assets.

Tags: Communication Skills, develop employees stay plans, develop stay plan, Develop Stay Plans, Eliminate Turnover Triggers, Emotional Intelligence, Employee engagement, employee satisfaction, employees accountability, engagement strategies, Exit Interviews, identify Employee problems, Intervention Strategies, Low-Cost Employee Engagement, Low-Cost Retention, Marcia Zidle, Performance Motivation, Powerful Employee Engagement, Powerful Employee Retention, Retain Critical Employees, Retention, retention strategies, Retention Tools, SHRM, Stay Interviews, Workplace Leadership