Stay Interviews to Boost Retention

Malin Grundström, Senior Consultant and Head of Alumnis operations in Southern Sweden discusses how regularly conducted ‘Stay Interviews’ between leadership and their reports can provide valuable insights into daily work experiences and strengthen the employee's engagement and retention within the organisation.

Empowering Leaders and Employees

Exit interviews are commonly used to determine what prompted an employee to leave and sometimes to provide a final chance to persuade them to stay. But with their subject’s imminent departure, they mostly happen too late to solve problems and retain valuable employees.

On the other hand, whether you're speaking to a data analyst, an account manager, or a project leader, stay interviews give a voice to your professional team whilst they are still firmly in role. They help leaders and their organisations learn where they can improve their practices to retain valued staff and improve employee engagement. By nature, they should be positive discussions that can give leaders an opportunity to eliminate turnover problems and respond to individual and common concerns.

In a world where employees want more than just a salary, stay interviews can be valuable evidence that their employers value and appreciate them. A stay interview can demonstrate to reports that their leaders care about their satisfaction and opinions. In addition, it is a way for a leader to show vulnerability, humility, transparency, and empathy – all qualities that make for exceptional leadership.

What might be revealed

Whilst commonly used to capture input from already satisfied and fully engaged employees stay interviews, delivered in a more formal way, can be particularly useful in highlighting turnover triggers and allow organisations to respond to issues before they get out of control and result in losing valuable talent. They may expose issues such as:

Low or unequal remuneration

Problems with lack of development
An inconsistent company culture

By using stay interviews to resolve negative employee experiences, organisations will be better positioned to retain key hires.

When to conduct them

Stay Interviews should ideally be separated from employee performance reviews. They should focus solely on identifying specific improvements that will raise employees' levels of engagement and retention and should not mutate into telling employees the ways that they can improve their own contribution. This means that stay interviews should not be add-ons to performance-appraisal meetings but should instead be separate meetings that are entirely focused on what leaders can do for their employees.

An important additional reason keeping this level of separation is that performance appraisals are usually annual. A year can be too long for issues to build up and chip away at employee satisfaction. For this reason, it may be most effective to undertake them 2-4 times per year.

Where and how

Stay interviews should be conducted one-on-one, in a confidential and safe environment. They should ideally be conducted in person rather than remotely, even if a meeting must be scheduled months in advance due to travel or some form of hybrid working or geographical barrier.

Their aim is to gather detailed insight into how a team member feels about their employer’s culture and work practices. To accomplish this, leaders will need to delve deep and search for honest answers. The questions might include:

What do you enjoy about your role?
What would you change about the way we work with clients?
How do you feel about the way that we run projects?
How would you describe the interactions with your team and how well they work together?
What changes would you make to improve collaboration?

What happens next is crucial

“Conducting stay interviews is a great tool for leaders to deliver a clear message that each employee is important for the company’s success and that their contribution is valued.”

— Malin Grundström

During the interview, leaders should make it clear that they value their employees' feedback; that they take their input seriously and that their feedback will be treated confidentially.

Most importantly leaders should let their reports know what the company plan to do with their feedback. Combining stay interviews with retention goals and other initiatives will result in a clear understanding that responsibility for retention and engagement lies with leadership, who are in the best position to influence and drive improvements.

Stay interviews build trust. Leaders who ask, listen, act, and communicate honestly strengthen trust with their employees, the absolute most important supervisory skill for increasing engagement and retention. Leaders who conduct effective stay interviews, deliver a clear message that each employee is important for the company's success and that their leadership wants them to stay.

After leaders begin conducting stay interviews, they should endeavour to track employee turnover. If successful, the organisation will be able to boost retention rates, hold onto star performers, and even attract new members to the team.

About Alumni

Effective leaders are one of the most important assets within an organisation and recognising and realising their potential will not only deliver a competitive advantage to aid your business strategy but also improve leadership attraction and retention.

Alumni has over 30 years’ experience of executive search, helping forward-thinking companies identify and attract their leaders for tomorrow. We also have a complementary portfolio of services offering a fully rounded perspective to your talent management- and leadership development needs.