A stay interview is when an employer sits down with an employee to gather information about the things the employee values about their job and to discover what the worker believes can be improved.
With a stay interview, managers can detect employee dissatisfaction and remedy it in time. This removes the risk of employee resignation and keeps the workforce happy. How does a stay interview work and how is it any different from others? We will provide answers to how a stay interview work and how it differs from other types of interview.
Conducting stay interviews is a useful way for employers to keep a check on how their employees are feeling being a part of the organization. It’s usually carried out in the first 12-14 months of an employee joining the company and is meant to be a casual, open-ended conversation to draw feedback from the employee. One essential reason behind conducting a stay interview is to pick up on useful insights, make necessary changes and prevent the loss of a quality employee.
When done correctly, stay interviews can have an extremely positive impact on your employee retention rate. The key is to use the information you collect from stay interviews. Failing to act on what your employees have to say will make you appear disingenuous and cheapen the value of stay interviews. Your team members took the time to share their honest feedback, and it’s your responsibility to try to make improvements.
What is the objective of a stay interview?
For many organizations, employee retention is top of mind. But keeping your top talent engaged and productive starts with understanding what employees want, what they like, and what they’d like to change.
Stay interviews have grown increasingly popular, especially in today’s climate. In fact, one survey reported that more than 50% of respondents were already conducting stay interviews or planning to start doing so soon.
Stay interviews are an important employee retention lever. They help you understand what’s keeping your people from leaving (or why they might be tempted to leave in the first place).
If you’re ready to kick off a stay interview of your own, look no further. Here’s a step-by-step guide to scheduling and conducting a stay interview with one of your top-performing employees.
1. Decide who will conduct the interview
While these conversations can be run by HR, they’re often more effective when led by an employee’s direct or skip-level manager. Consider choosing the individual the employee is closest with, as the employee might be more forthcoming with their feedback if they trust the meeting organizer.
2. Identify and reach out to employees
These conversations shouldn’t be conducted on the fly – they need to be planned and private. Inform your employee of the purpose of your conversation, schedule a formal 1-on-1 meeting or call at a convenient time for them, and share stay interview questions upfront so they have time to formulate their thoughts ahead of time. If you aren’t sure when to schedule one of these conversations, a popular milestone is 90 days after a new hire starts. However, you can schedule one anytime you feel the need.
3. Ask questions
Now, it’s time to sit down and conduct the stay interview. To help you get the most out of the discussion, we’ve put together a list of our favorite stay interview questions below.
Culture Amp’s top stay interview questions:
- What do you like most about working here?
- What do you like least?
- If you could change one thing about your team what would it be?
- If you could change one thing about our company, what would it be?
- Do you feel valued at work? Why or why not?
- Do you feel your work is properly recognized at our company? Why or why not?
- Do you feel the company is invested in your professional growth? Why or why not?
- How would you rate your work-life balance?
- What do you want to be doing that you aren’t currently doing?
- What are the three most important things you would like to accomplish right now?
- What do you need that’s preventing you from reaching those goals?
- How can we best support you to achieve those goals?
Don’t feel like you have to get through all of these questions during your conversation. You should feed off your employee’s responses and take the conversation where they want it to go
4. Listen
While you can certainly ask follow-up questions and try to understand the “why” behind their answers, make sure you’re not commandeering the conversation. Once you ask a question, be quiet and listen – your employee should be the one doing the majority of the talking. Take detailed notes or record the conversation if you have your employee’s permission, so you can revisit their responses as needed.
5. Take action
Next is the most labor-intensive part of stay interviews: taking action. For managers, this might be working with that individual employee to find ways to keep them engaged, like encouraging them to take paid time off and creating opportunities to adopt a flexible work schedule, work with cross-functional teams, or take on new projects in areas of interest. Be sure to circle back with your employee around any next steps you discussed during your conversation to keep them updated on your progress and remind them their professional growth is still top of mind for you.
6. Predict turnover
Lastly, it’s time to document these conversations in a spreadsheet and rank an employee’s likelihood of leaving your business. While you can use whatever ranking system you want, many organizations adopt a green, yellow, and red system. An employee who receives a green rating seems like they are going to stay at least a year, a yellow individual might stay 6-12 months, while a red employee is very unhappy and likely looking for other opportunities. Based on these ratings, you can track flight risks and start succession planning.
You can also use this spreadsheet to measure the impact of your actions by re-interviewing these employees later in the year to see if their ranking has changed. For example, if an employee was ranked as a flight risk due to poor work-life balance, then it could be good to re-interview this same employee 6 months later after another individual was added to their team to help lighten their workload. Re-interviewing allows you to track if this change brought about an improvement that pushed the employee into the yellow or even green. This can help you prove the effectiveness of your stay interviews and show you’re actively working to improve employee retention.
A stay interview provides an employer and employee to provide feedback that will improve job satisfaction efficiency. Use this guide to learn how to prepare for stay interviews, whether you are the interviewer or the interviewed.
