A guide to enhancing employee retention with stay interviews
For employers, when an employee leaves it can create a big hole within your teams and with up to one in five employees expecting to change jobs this year, meaning businesses are looking for new ways to retain their staff amid “The Great Resignation”.
This is where a stay interview can help gather important information to help you improve retention across your business and to spot problems throughout your employee lifecycle. Keep reading to learn more about stay interviews and their benefits, and how to conduct them.
What is a stay interview?
A stay interview is an important tool to help you understand why your employees choose to stay with your organisation – rather than changing jobs or industries. It’s a way of gathering informal feedback from your employees about their role and skills and if it aligns to their future goals.
Stay interviews can happen throughout an employee’s time with your organisation enabling you to be proactive in keeping your employees motivated. They’re conducted by managers on an informal basis, and can help identify where you need to bolster your retention strategy.
Exit interviews on the other hand, are conducted during the offboarding process and usually administered by HR. The exit interview is often a formalised process and usually conducted at a point where it’s too late to make any meaningful changes that will influence that particular employee’s decision to leave or stay.
With HR teams still and people shifting their priorities to achieve a family and work-life balance, it’s more important than ever to consider stay interviews in your and retention strategies.
What are the benefits of conducting stay interviews?
Stay interviews are a win-win for employees and organisations, giving employees a clear sign that their voice matters, that they can share what works and what needs to be improved, enabling HR to use that feedback to improve key areas of work for all employees.
1. Using stay interviews to improve retention
Right now, recruitment is tough and costly. Stay interviews can improve retention by understanding why people choose stay with you. Interviewing your employees this way gives you the chance to improve their work experience. Feedback like in a stay interview can help employees feel engaged.
2. Address problems early
Gathering employee feedback regularly through stay interviews can help HR teams work with managers to spot underlying problems with employees. From workload, to fulfilment, job satisfaction and mental health and wellbeing to wider issues like culture, stay interviews can offer HR an up-to-date view on issues within the business and address them proactively.
With 21% of UK workers citing unhappiness at work as a key driver in looking for other jobs, it’s important to gather this feedback to enable your managers and HR teams to take action. Conducting stay interviews regularly can give you valuable trend data on the employee lifecycle, and pain points that might lead to unhappiness.
3. Understand employee priorities and motivation
Stay interviews give you a chance to discover what motivates your employees and how their priorities are changing. Employees are rethinking what work means to them with 65% agreeing that they are placing higher value on outside of work aspects. This could help your HR teams select wider benefits that align with these priorities, like child-care options, familial leave or even career development options like shadowing, mentoring and learning and development programmes.
How to implement a stay interview
If you’re looking to implement stay interviews within your organisation here are some considerations:
- Can you turn one-to-one sessions into a stay interview? One-to-ones are a great opportunity and environment for a stay interview as these are usually more informal check-ins of performance. Alternatively, you can schedule them outside of regular one-to-ones, just make sure they aren’t tied to as this may not generate honest feedback.
- How regularly do you want to check-in? There’s no right or wrong answer but you want to gather the information from stay interviews at regular intervals without your employees getting fatigued. You should also remember this is a long term process and should be repeated to gather updated data to make improvements to your organisation.
- Who should have a stay interview? It’s important that stay interviews are organisation wide, and that all leaders cascade this practice throughout the business.
- Should there be a structure? You should structure your stay interviews with a series of questions you want to ask that gives your organisation and leaders enough data to take meaningful action.
For all stay interviews, this is likely to be a step change for your organisation, so make sure it’s widely communicated to all employees and explain how and when it will take place. Once you’ve begun the process and started gathering your feedback form employees, make sure you share the results. Employees will feel more open to discussion if they know their feedback has been taken onboard.
10 questions to ask during a stay interview
It’s important to create a structure for your stay interviews and a big part of that will be the questions you ask. We have compiled a list that can help you understand how your employees are feeling, why they choose to stay with you and any areas they’d like to see improved. HR teams may want to create a stay interview toolkit and training for managers and people leaders to help provide support and consistency.
Take a look below at a few questions to get you started:
- What do you like most/least about working here?
- What keeps you working for this company?
- What motivates you?/What demotivates you?
- If you could change ONE thing about your job, what would it be?
- How do you like to be recognised for your work?
- What skills do you have that are not being used in your current role?
- What can I do more or less of as a manager?
- How would you describe our culture?
- What might tempt you to leave?
- Do you have any suggestions for ways we could improve those things you’ve raised?
Stay interviews in conclusion
Stay interviews are a great way of measuring your employees’ experiences of work and the workplace. It gets right to the heart of why your employees choose to stay with you, what your employees’ motivations are and can help improve retention across your business.
For more information, take a look at our guide on Redefining your Employee Experience. You can also explore the impact of the “Great Resignation” and how investing in talent, skills and employee development can help support your retention strategies.
