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:

• What’s your frame of mind today?

• Who do you feel connected to at work?

• What barriers can I remove for you?

• 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:

• First, though they potentially highlight trends within an organization, they create a window into only one employer-employee relationship.

• Second, they require companies to spend sometimes costly amounts of time interviewing, analyzing, and interpreting responses.

• 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.

We’re more than half-way through the year, and I’ve got a scary question for you: Where are you with your annual review? Have you thought about it since you walked through it with your boss just before the holidays? Have you made any progress on the goals you set in January?

August is not the traditional time to think about the annual review. But that makes it the best time to reconsider the practice. What is your companies policy on performance reviews?  If you don’t have one, then you have options. If you need to be compliant with your policies, then you have to deal with the best way to handle this important task. 

You see, it’s my belief that the standard performance review fails workers and employers. It’s also my belief that there’s another way. Behavior data allows managers to speak in specifics with their workers to drive progress all year long. Intrigued? Read on.

Where the annual review fails

The annual review fails for three reasons. 

1. It’s taxing.

If you’ve ever managed anyone, you know how much work goes into a performance review. Each review deserves your full attention — after all, that’s the mechanism that will drive workers’ growth (and, not to mention, pay) throughout the next year. But combing through 12 months of meeting notes to devise each reports’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities takes serious time and effort. 

There’s another side to consider here: The employee. Performance reviews are a classic trigger for stress and anxiety among workers. The performance review itself, embroiled in nerves and tension, steals the show, taking attention from what’s really demanding: A coming year of hard work and progress.

2. It’s subjective.

Managers are human. That means managers are subjective. One manager may see an employee’s socializing as self-indulgent procrastination, while another may see it as a collaboration-boosting strategy. The difference in opinion could color the tone of a performance review. 

Employees are also human and subjective. An employee may interpret a manager’s firm feedback as a nice-to-have goal rather than the key to their promotion. 

3. It’s vague.

Performance reviews are often littered with vague feedback and hazy goals. This leaves managers and employees in an unhelpful spot: Employees don’t know how to move forward, and managers don’t know how to assess their progress.

Behavior data does it better

The problems with performance reviews leave a lot of room for improvement. And they’ll motivate some to go back to the drawing board entirely. Here’s my preferred option: Behavior data. 

Using scientific tools to unveil the patterns in your employees’ actions, thinking, preferences, and passions, you’ll see how they work and why. You’ll gain the insights you need to propel them toward better performance. And you’ll ascertain where they want to go in the long term.

Let us, at PeopleBest, help you get to your 2022 finish line with a sample or insight of anyone on your team, on us!

PeopleBest is a revolutionary, simple and powerful way to capture the exact ‘DNA of success’ inside people, teams and companies

If you’re like me, you answered yes to those last two questions. I start to sweat come Q3, when we’ve passed the half-way mark and are barrelling through the summer. Maybe it’s my self consciousness speaking, but I’d like to think a lot of people feel this way. As time starts speeding by, those goals seem less lofty and more imposing.

As I face these challenges, I think a lot about motivation — both mine and my workers’. How do we maintain motivation throughout Q3 and into the end of the year? I’d like to offer three of my go-to strategies.

Offer Personalized Support

The first and best way to keep workers motivated is to offer personalized support: to identify and respond to the issues your workers struggle with. This effort entails some amount of research on the employer end — namely in some kind of listening. Many employers are beginning to recognize both the importance and payoff of listening. Sixty percent say they survey their entire organization at least quarterly, and many survey subsets of their workforce even more frequently.

Employee listening, whether it’s accomplished through pulse surveys, one-on-ones, or town halls, can help employers deliver targeted support to the workers who need it most. And when workers feel supported, they’re much more likely to be more productive and engaged.

Create Opportunities for Upskilling

Now that the year end is closing in on us, how can we help our people develop and use some new skills?  When workers feel stagnant, they quit. According to a LinkedIn report, 94% of respondents said they would stay in their jobs if their employer invested in their learning.

While upskilling certainly offers a boon for retention, it also serves as a mechanism for motivation. Workers who have opportunities to grow are shown to have greater motivation — especially when those opportunities align with their goals and ambitions.

Pair Passion and Purpose

Burnout is rampant in the workforce today. A lot of that can be attributed to overwork and stress; we are still living through a pandemic, after all. Coupled with the end of the year coming around the corner, this is even more of an issue.  When my team members are feeling burned out, I like to just make things simpler.  Instead of a lot of things to do or accomplish, I help them slow down and focus on the BIGGEST things we need to do. Less is more.

Workers who feel that their job and tasks relate to their interests and strengths are happier and more productive. A positive employee experience can double innovation, improve customer satisfaction and drive profits. In other words, an employee’s happiness at work has a lot to do with their ability to perform.  Remember, ‘work hard, play hard’.

Make the rest of 2022 amazing for yourself and your team!

The PeopleBest platform allows leaders to know their people and offer personalized support, identify opportunities for upskilling, and unite passion with purpose. To see how the platform could boost motivation on your team, 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.

I’m in favor of all these things. Who wouldn’t want to learn more about cheese pairings? But the “bring yourself to work” movement misses a fundamental element of the human psyche: behavior. We can encourage workers to show off their quirks and display their passions, but until we include behavior in our definition of “whole self,” the strategy does little for business.

That would be a huge lost opportunity: By accounting for behavior, employers can encourage openness at work and harness that freedom by aligning employees’ passions and opportunities. There are a million ways this strategy will boost your business, but today we’re going to talk about three areas where behavior spawns benefits.

#1: Revved up recruiting

Imagine recruiting without the resume and cover letter. There’s less work for recruiters and candidates alike. There’s fewer formalities, headaches and papers. But what’s left?

A behavior-enabled recruiting process should eliminate the frustrations once caused by the recruiting tactics of old. Instead, it provides data-driven insights into a candidate’s skill, potential, and passion. It helps you see where job seekers belong in your organization, streamlining and fireproofing the talent decisions that were once messy and haphazard.

#2 Spurred employee growth

Employers that invest in upskilling wield a powerful tool capable of both stalling resignation rates and bolstering engagement.

Upskilling works best when you know something about the workers you’re offering it to. A training on public speaking may terrify someone who excels at independent, numbers-based work. But it could offer incredible motivation to the worker who’s keen on scoring a leadership position in the next couple of years. You just have to know the difference.

#3: Synchronized teams

Organizations can enable teams by respecting individuals, and I’m convinced that the best way to do that is through knowledge. When we understand how and why workers thrive, we can match them to the right teams and the right assignments, respecting their natural inclinations and passions better than we ever did before. With AI-driven insights into how workers operate, employers can study their teams in seconds to determine who excels where and why.

To find out how you can revitalize your people approach with behavior insights, book a demo with PeopleBest 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