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

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 dealt with 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.

Why should you Attend: A recent LinkedIn news article titled "Exit Interview, Meet Stay Interview” states:

“Scores of people are leaving jobs for greener pastures. That's a lot of exit interviews. While the Great Reshuffle is upon us, and looks to continue well in to 2023, a new kind of interview is growing in popularity - the stay interview. It's a conversation not focused on reasons for quitting, but rather 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 of 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

• 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
• Study a simple “how-to-toolkit” Who to select, the timing and frequency, the interview format, ways to handle common problems that arise

• CEO’s
• COO’s
• VP of Human Resources
• Chief Learning Officer
• Directors
• Project Managers
• Operation Managers and Supervisors
• Team Leaders
• Human Resources Professionals