In the fight for talent, recruiters and hiring managers can’t wait until an employee is out the door to figure out why they left. That’s why some companies conduct stay interviews, which is when they ask for feedback from a current employee that can inform an organization’s approach to retaining top talent.
What Is A Stay Interview?
A stay interview is a conversation with a high-performing employee with the goal of discovering what they like about their role, and what they would like to change. Stay interviews are an opportunity to both uncover what motivates that employee and to also build trust with them as a manager.
Incorporating stay interviews into your retention and employee engagement strategies can help you learn what matters to your team members and what they’d like to see improve — long before they decide to find another opportunity.
Read on to learn what a stay interview is, why it’s valuable and the best questions to ask.
What Is a Stay Interview?
A stay interview is a meeting used to uncover what parts of an employee’s job keeps them coming back every day. It is often a one-on-one conversation conducted between a tenured, high-performing employee and their direct manager. Contrary to popular belief, a stay interview isn’t a conversation where you attempt to convince a departing employee to stay. Rather, it is a way to gather feedback about what an employee values in their role, and what might make a great employee move on.
The Importance of Stay Interviews
A stay interview is just as, if not more, important than an exit interview. Stay interviews are conducted with enough time to identify and correct a problem. Exit interviews, on the other hand, occur when an employee is headed out the door.
When done correctly, stay interviews can have an extremely positive impact on your employee retention rate. The key is to use the information you collect from stay interviews. Failing to act on what your employees have to say will make you appear disingenuous and cheapen the value of stay interviews. Your team members took the time to share their honest feedback, and it’s your responsibility to try to make improvements.
How to Conduct a Stay Interview
Use the following guidelines when scheduling and conducting your stay interviews to ensure they’re productive.
Who Should Conduct Stay Interviews?
Stay interviews should be led by the employee’s direct manager. This helps cultivate a strong relationship founded on trust and open communication, and an employee’s relationship with their manager significantly influences their decision to stay. One survey showed that less than one-third of employees “trust that their managers actually care about their career progression.”
Who Should Receive Stay Interviews?
Your most tenured, high-performing employees should be the primary focus of your stay interview program; they’ve been with your company the longest and clearly there’s something that’s kept them coming back.
Unlike exit interviews, when you’re less interested in understanding why disengaged employees choose to leave, stay interviews should be conducted across the board for all employees. Why? Because people stay for different reasons. To prevent employees from walking out the door, you need to learn what makes your company valuable to each individual.
When Should You Conduct a Stay Interview?
A stay interview should not occur right after an employee starts, nor should it coincide with an annual review. The employee should be fully settled into their role and accustomed to the environment in order for the stay interview to yield useful results. Aim to conduct a stay interview annually for each employee, but ensure it’s not included as an add-on to a performance review.
Conduct all stay interviews within a few days or weeks of each other. That way, you can promptly act on the data you’ve collected so employee feedback is not left unaddressed for a long period of time.
Stay Interview Best Practices
Prioritize Two-Way Communication
There is one caveat to stay interviews and it has to do with your company culture. In order for stay interviews to be productive and yield honest feedback, employees need to trust management. If your type of organizational culture prioritizes hierarchy and separation between senior leadership and employees, face-to-face interviews are probably not the best method of collecting feedback. Until two-way communication is a core value and staple of your culture, stay interviews will not be productive.
Choose a Comfortable Location
Much like an exit interview, you want to make the employee as comfortable as possible so they’re more inclined to share honest feedback. If possible, ask the employee where they’d like the interview to take place and be flexible with the location — they may ask to get out of the office and take a walk or visit a nearby coffee shop, so adapt to their requests when you can.
Take as Long as You Need
A stay interview can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. Unlike an exit interview where you have a set list of questions to get through, a stay interview should be more carefully tailored to the individual. Again, employees stay for different reasons, so take as long as you need to understand the individual’s satisfaction and frustrations.
Benefits of Stay Interviews
Leads to Insight for Employer Branding Strategy
Stay interviews are valuable to your employer branding strategy as they provide the insight you need to create an employer brand that will draw in new talent.
Improves Employee Engagement
Moreover, stay interviews are a useful engagement strategy. By identifying pain points before they become full-blown problems, you can improve your work environment to retain great employees. When done correctly, stay interviews can have an extremely positive impact on your employee retention rate. They are a beneficial engagement tactic coupled with employee engagement surveys and other tools for tracking engagement.
Proactive About Heading Off Employee Churn
A stay interview gives you the chance to avoid recurring problems, which is better than having to learn from your mistakes after the fact. Stay interviews also let managers gauge employees’ professional and personal wellness — and how much balance there is between the two. In doing so, management can get perspective on whether they need to intervene if an employee who’s been putting in a lot of work might be headed for burnout. Being proactive about fending off burnout — rather than reacting when it’s too late — is another way to encourage employees to stick around and make sure they enjoy showing up for work each day.
Cost-Effective (Compared to Recruiting)
Because stay interviews cost no more than the time it takes for managers and employees to have a conversation, they’re a cost-effective method for improving the workplace. That’s especially true in comparison to the costs associated with recruiting and hiring or the productivity lost when someone leaves the team because they were unhappy in their job.
Helps Uncover New Opportunities
Stay interviews don’t need to focus just on the negatives. Sure, it’s a time for employees to be open and honest about problems they’ve encountered in the workplace or elements of the culture that are hurting their productivity. But it can also be a chance to gain insight on where employees are looking for room to grow. Or what additional opportunities they’d like to see in terms of training and professional development.
Challenges of Stay Interviews
Can Involve Difficult Discussions
A stay interview can involve some vulnerable discussions about what the employee truly enjoys — or dislikes — about their job. Grievances could be brought up about their role, the company, other colleagues or management themselves, which can be difficult to navigate for both the employee and manager in the interview. It’s worth the discomfort though.
Can Feel Intimidating
Conducting a stay interview, especially with an employee who has never been in one, can be daunting. The employee may feel they are being questioned about their commitment to the company, or feel resistant to speaking openly about their feelings of the job. This can lead to a lack of usable feedback for both the manager and the employee present.
Require Acting on Feedback
Actually implementing the feedback gathered in a stay interview takes a lot of work. Understanding and addressing employee concerns means being accountable and taking initiative as a manager. While this can require effort, fixing employee issues as soon as possible tells your workforce that you respect their input and encourages them to stay for the long-term.
13 Stay Interview Questions to Ask
Use the following questions to start collecting valuable employee feedback during stay interviews. To convey your appreciation for the candidate and their value to the company, you must actively listen to what they have to say and ask thoughtful follow-up questions.
1. What Do You Look Forward to at Work Every Day?
Dive right in and get to the heart of what motivates and excites employees about their role, your office and their work life.
2. What Do You Dislike About Work Every Day?
The goal of a stay interview is not only to figure out what your people like about working for you, but to uncover any grievances they have that could compel them to look elsewhere for employment.
3. What Do You Think of the Way Employees are Recognized?
When asked which factors were most important to them in a job, 37 percent of employees answered that they valued employee recognition above all else. To keep people around, you need to recognize them in a way that resonates with each individual. Asking this question in stay interviews can help you understand how comprehensive your employee recognition program is and identify different methods of acknowledgment.
4. How Would You Rate Our Work-Life Balance? How Could It Be Improved?
In addition to employee recognition, work-life balance is a huge retention factor. When companies provide their employees with a healthy work-life balance, they’re more likely to retain their employees. If employee’s typically come in early, stay late and work into the wee hours of the night, work-life balance must be improved. Consider implementing a work-from-home policy to offer employees more flexibility.
5. What Do You Enjoy About the Professional Development Services Offered? What Do You Dislike?
No one wants to feel stagnant in their role. In addition to clearly outlining career paths and providing opportunities for growth, it’s important to make employee development a central aspect of your company culture. In fact, employees who have internal mobility within their companies stay at those companies twice as long as those who experience no mobility.
6. Within the Past Year, What Was a Day That Caused You Anxiety or Frustrations?
Answers to this question will help identify standout and serious problems for your team members. Then, ask if the employee can explain the source of their frustration within the situation. Once they’ve explained the cause, ask them about the solution: Can you pinpoint what eventually occurred to help alleviate your stress? This series of questions will target what might make employees want to leave and what keeps them around.
7. Within the Past Year, What Was a “Good Day”?
As an alternative to the previous question, asking about a recent good day at work will provide insight into what the employee enjoys about their job. They may define a good day as when they were recognized for their success on a project, when they could work from home or didn’t have to interact with a particular employee. Ultimately, an answer to this question should clue the manager into what aspects of work have a positive impact on the employee’s day-to-day.
8. What Does Your Dream Job Look Like?
Since this is a broad question, employees will have to answer it in whatever way is most meaningful and impactful to them. For example, if an employee describes their dream job as one they can leave in the office at the end of the day, they probably don’t have that luxury right now and you should take note to evaluate and improve your work-life balance. Or, an employee may say their dream job is a cross-functional role that involves regular communication with employees meaning they are probably feeling siloed in their current position.
9. What Did You Love About Your Last Position That You No Longer Have?
Get down to the nitty-gritty of the employee’s role and responsibilities. What don’t they enjoy about their current position? What do they wish they could carry over from their previous role? Answers to this question will help managers understand how they can improve the day-to-day experience of their direct reports.
10. What Did You Love About Your Last Job That You No Longer Have?
Answers to this question will likely account for your company culture, flexibility, office environment, as well as employee perks and benefits. Aggregate responses to establish a holistic representation of your shortcomings as a potential employer. You can then begin to address the most common qualms and make impactful improvements to your office.
11. What Do You Think About on Your Way to Work?
A response to this question will help illustrate the employee’s shift in mindset when they’re headed into the office. Ideally, if they’re happy at work and excited about their job, their thoughts will be positive. Or, they may not even think about work. A cause for concern is when the employee has negative thoughts or a sense of dread while headed to work.
12. What Do You Think About on Your Way Home From Work?
Similarly, the employee’s response would ideally suggest a positive sentiment about work, but not necessarily about leaving work. Of course, people are generally excited to get back to their life outside of the office by the end of the day, but you don’t want the five o’clock whistle to be a prolonged sign of relief. Furthermore, you don’t want employees to leave irritated or annoyed by the day’s events.
13. What Can I Do to Make Your Experience Better?
Again, a stay interview should be conducted by a direct manager since they are in the best position to enact change for the employee.
The objective of a stay interview is three-fold. Learn what employees enjoy about your company.Figure out what employees dislike about your company. Reinforce two-way communication between management and employees. This question targets all three objectives, allowing the employee to express what they want in their role, what currently dissatisfies them and encourages them to establish trust in their manager.
Implementing a Stay Interview Action Plan
Once stay interviews are complete, it’s time to take thoughtful action on the feedback that’s been gathered. To foster trust and confidence between employees and management, it’s important to make sure employees feel their concerns are being heard and that managers are responding appropriately.
Managers should determine what people or resources are necessary to accomplish the tasks laid out and then set a reasonable timeline for getting them done. Those elements should then be communicated to their direct reports and any other stakeholders involved in potential changes.
Managers should be clear about any expectations for employees, such as new or changing responsibilities, as well as any steps being taken at the management or leadership level. That communication shouldn’t happen just once. There should be follow-up on the progress of the action plan. In the case of long-term initiatives, for example, it might be a good idea to check in again three to six months down the road. By taking the time to implement these plans, you are not just telling employees their time and candor is valuable, but demonstrating it through concrete action.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I prepare for a stay interview?
For employees, think about what you’re satisfied with in your job (role growth, responsibilities), what you feel could be improved in your job, how you feel about your work and the company culture and what you feel the company could do to better support you in your career.
For managers or employers, determine what issues your employees potentially face at work and frame questions around them, and note what company resources are available to employees if certain issues arise. Additionally, establish when, where and how often stay interviews will be conducted.
What is another word for stay interview?
Stay interviews may also be referred to as retention interviews or stay conversations.
What does a stay interview look like?
A stay interview is often a one-on-one conversation between an employee and their direct manager or an HR team member. Stay interviews are structured by manager questions, and can take about 20 minutes to one hour to complete.
