As the Great Resignation swept across the business world this year, companies reached for new strategies to boost retention and slow turnover. Organizations rolled out enticing new benefits, upped employee appreciation measures, and handed out competitive counteroffers.
Among these tried-and-true strategies, another emerged: The stay interview.
What is a stay interview?
The stay interview isn’t technically new, as Georgetown management professor Brooks Holtom told CNBC’s Jennifer Liu. But the tactic enjoyed renewed attention as employers intensified retention efforts.
In essence, stay interviews are like exit interviews with a twist. Instead of analyzing the motives of workers on their way out the door, stay interviews target employees who are engaged and motivated. They identify what draws committed team members to their work, what they’re looking forward to, and what the business could do to support them to go even further.
In a recent article appearing in the Harvard Business Review, one business leader recommended four questions employers and managers can use in stay interviews:
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What’s your frame of mind today?
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Who do you feel connected to at work?
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What barriers can I remove for you?
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What new thing do you want to learn that will excite you and help you grow?
In his interview with CNBC, professor Holtom suggested a few more queries: What excites you to come into work? Do you feel good about the impact of your work? Do you see a future for yourself at the company? If you were manager for a day, what would you do differently?
Make it meaningful — and easy
These questions all seek to uncover the essence of an employee’s relationship with her job and her employer. The answers, when honest and detailed, provide a wealth of information to organizations.
While stay interviews carry tremendous value, they do present a few challenges:
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First, though they potentially highlight trends within an organization, they create a window into only one employer-employee relationship.
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Second, they require companies to spend sometimes costly amounts of time interviewing, analyzing, and interpreting responses.
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Third, they generate personal answers that are much harder to analyze than standardized data.
This is not to say organizations should ditch the stay interview. But here’s my suggestion: Support the stay interview with another mode of employee listening that retrieves information from your whole workforce in a quick and standardized manner.
Learn how you can dial into what makes each of your people thrive using PeopleBest, and take your stay interviews to a new level. At PeopleBest, we’ve created an AI-powered platform that provides employees’ code to success. Ask us how we can help you discover the best in each of your people.
To find out how PeopleBest can help you fight retention, book a demo and set up a time to chat with one of our specialists.
PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies.
