Conduct Stay Interviews

A crucial strategy for engaging and retaining talent is having conversations with every person you hope will stay on your team. We coined the term stay interview to describe those chats. If you hold stay interviews, you’ll have less regrettable turnover and fewer exit interviews!

When we suggest asking employees why they stay or what would keep them, we hear, “You’ve got to be kidding,” “Isn’t that illegal?” or “What if they give me an answer I don’t want to hear?” Managers dance around this core subject usually for one of three reasons:

• Some managers fear putting people on the spot or putting ideas into their heads (as if they never thought about leaving on their own).

• Some managers are afraid they will be unable to do anything anyway, so why ask? They fear that the question will raise more dust than they can settle and may cause employees to expect answers and solutions that are out of the managers’ hands.

• Some managers say they don’t have the time to have these critical one-on-one discussions with their talented people. There is an urgency to produce, leaving little time to listen, let alone ask. (If you don’t have time for these discussions with the people who contribute to your success, where will you find the time to interview, select, orient, and train their replacements?)