Unlike exit interviews, which help companies determine factors that caused employees to leave, stay interviews help you stop turnover in its tracks. Stay interviews are the newest trend and allow you to assess the levels of engagement and satisfaction in your organization. They highlight issues early on and build trust with your employees, which will end up reducing the need to perform exit interviews at all. Engagement surveys and exit interviews are still essential but here’s why stay interviews are also important. 

What is a Stay Interview?

Stay interviews are informal conversations with employees that help provide insights into their day-to-day experiences with your company. Conducting these interviews consistently promotes employee well-being and enables organizations to uncover certain issues that might be holding employees back. Whether it’s speaking to a team leader, a manager, or an executive, stay interviews give a voice to your professional team. This helps companies find areas where they can improve in order to retain top talent. 

Stay interviews are a positive discussion that should be more of a two-way dialogue rather than an interview. Your employees will only share how they feel about work honestly if they feel a sense of psychological safety, knowing they can speak freely without fear of retaliation and know their feedback will be accepted. That requires managers to be honest and open, asking employees what they enjoy about work, what could be better, and areas where you as a manager can improve.

Why You Should Use Stay Interviews

A strong recruitment strategy can make hiring top talent easier; retaining that talent, on the other hand, is still hard. Stay interviews help you increase retention. They show your hires that you care about their satisfaction and their well-being as well. The modern-day workforce wants more than just a salary; they want evidence that their employers value and appreciate them. 

Stay interviews highlight reasons for turnover and allow employers to respond to and fix issues before they grow. With them, you can address issues regarding work development, company culture, engagement, just to name a few. By using stay interviews to fix the problems that employees voice with you, you’ll create a stronger employer brand. With that said, you won’t not only retain your best employees but attract new talent too. 

How to Conduct Effective Stay Interviews

Effective stay interviews require one-on-one interactions in a confidential and safe environment. The aim is to get detailed insights into how your team members feel about your company and employer brand. These sit downs should focus on how your employees feel about the work they do every day, the value of their contributions, and how they feel within the organization, rather than sharing status updates about tasks and projects. 

In order to gather the insight you’re looking for, you need to ask specific questions and search for honest answers. The questions you ask in each stay interview will depend on various factors, including the employee you’re speaking to and the information you want to gather. 

Here are some examples of common questions managers can ask in stay interviews:

• What do you look forward to when you come to work every day?
• What do you like most and least about working here?
• What would you change about company culture?
• What motivates and demotivates you at work?
• What would you like to learn?
• What talents are you not using in your current role?
• Do you have enough tools and resources to do your job properly?

Don’t forget to make it clear that you value your employees’ feedback and that the company plans on doing something with it. After each interview, it’s essential to show your team that you’re taking their input seriously and that their feedback will be treated confidentially. Once you begin conducting stay interviews, make sure to track your employee turnover. With luck, you will be able to boost retention rates, hold onto top talent, and attract new hires even more.

Amanee Hasan

Amanee Hasan is a Senior Content Writer at ZenHR, an award-winning and top-rated HR solution that offers world-class HR software services in the MENA region. Her main focuses are SEO, UX writing, copywriting, and creating content highlighting the latest HR trends, and gives organizations and individuals the tools they need to create successful work environments where people thrive.