Your employee is resigning. You hold an exit interview, partially to learn why that employee left so that you can gain some insight on helping to keep other employees in the future.
Why not talk to them before they decide to leave?
“Stay” interviews reveal ways employers can make their organizations more appealing to workers in an increasingly competitive market — before they lose their workers to someone else.
“The more you understand what’s really motivating and important to your employees, the more you’re going to retain them,” says Melissa Olsen, shareholder-in-charge of human resources at KerberRose, which began implementing stay interviews several years ago as a way for the firm to remain competitive to talent.
“I wanted to make sure we really understood where we needed to focus our employee engagement, from benefits to wages to software technology,” Olsen says. “Understanding what was resonating with our team across generations was really, really important.”
For example, about five years ago Olsen noticed very low use of company health benefits among young workers — those under age 27 who still had the ability to stay on their parents’ insurance.
“So they’re missing a huge monetary value of our benefits plan,” she says. “We were missing a huge piece of where that value was for them. It becomes a conversation about what we can do to make sure that we’re adding value [for] that age group.”
Olsen worked to implement a student loan repayment plan with a $7,000 value over the course of five years. “It’s very useful for organizations to understand where that pulse is continuously and annually on a regular basis,” she says.
Any time leadership can get valuable feedback — whether it’s stay interviews, exit interviews, engagement surveys or culture surveys — it’s valuable to the organization, she says.
“Understanding what makes us distinct and unique for our current team members helps us promote why KerberRose is an employer of choice and be genuine about it,” Olsen says. “And I can’t overstate the importance of that.”
Richard P. Finnegan’s book “The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention,” published by the Society for Human Resource Management, says that stay interviews should be kept distinct from the performance review process and focus on ways to improve employee engagement and retention.
“I think that it’s always important to be engaging your staff, your employees, your direct reports, to understand what they want out of their employment with you, too, because it’s just not a one-way street,” says Tricia Perkins, senior strategic HR advisor at the Madison-based Lake Effect HR & Law.
Particularly in a time when unemployment is low and people are frequently changing jobs, “the importance of communicating, not just about what they’re doing in their job but how they want to be developed, is really important,” Perkins says. And since communication is at the core of these meetings, it’s best if managers conduct the interviews themselves.
“Just checking in and asking somebody how they are doing as an individual will help with engagement,” Perkins says. “That just opens up the door to stay interviews, to say, ‘We understand there are a lot of opportunities out there; what keeps you here?’”
In these conversations, employers should convey why they’re conducting the interview and actively listen to employees and their concerns. They also should follow up on the conversation, whether or not the company is able to implement an employee’s suggestion or request, Perkins says.
Additionally, employers have a responsibility to report discrimination or harassment to the appropriate leaders, Perkins says.
Overall, interviews can tie in directly with mental wellness in the workplace, particularly after more than two years of COVID and when more employees are seeking flexible work schedules or hybrid work environments. “I’ve seen a shift in how we manage, [being] more of an empathic leader than just focused on the work at hand,” Perkins says.
Supervisors also can ask what they as managers can do differently, how their employees want to grow within their positions and organizations, and the like.
“If you continue to have these types of conversations, it just becomes the norm,” Perkins says.
