Stay Interviews
When people stay with you, what are the forces at work? It’s just as, or more, important to know why people stay as it is to know why they leave. The ‘stay interview’ is rarely done, but may have the potential to stop turnover dead in its tracks. These interviews can find out the niggling things that annoy people, but that can be more comprehensively exposed in a well formulated climate survey. By contrast, there is no way to find out what keeps people - unless you ask them.
Stay Interviews should be conducted annually and provide an excellent opportunity to improve supervisor-subordinate relationships that are not already damaged. For the small cost of conducting such interviews, and to be seen to respond to the feedback, the potential benefits to organisation and members seem substantial. The is no known research to support this expectation, although intuitive logic is always well ahead of research data.
There are internal and external (to organisation) forces at work that keep people at a given workplace. If it is external forces that keep people in place then the organisation will be in trouble when those conditions change. The desirable state is to have organisational internal forces providing compelling reasons for the person to stay.
This program acknowledges and provides a list of customary internal and external forces to provide adequate background knowledge for delegates. The main purpose of the program, however, is to explore ways to conduct ‘stay interviews’ so as to obtain high quality (free of impression management) and high quantity data.
Who will benefit from Stay Interviews
HR people or others such as executives, managers or supervisors, who are responsible for ‘getting’ and ‘keeping’ people, and want to find out and monitor why people stay.
Outcomes of Stay Interviews
Delegates will better understand:
- the crucial importance of safety & trust (climate)
- ways to ensure safety
- significance of internal (organisational) and external (environment) forces on the person
- why people will be cautious or even avoid ‘stay interviews’
- where and when to conduct ’stay interviews’
- how to decide who should conduct the interview
- an effective structure for an ‘stay interview’
- how to begin such an interview
- how to phrase questions
- the kinds of questions to ask
- how to provide an opportunity for them to have their open say
- how to terminate the interview
- the imperative to follow up - where expected
Content of Stay Interviews
- motivational forces
- why people stay - versus - decide to stay
- emotions while people decide to stay
- emotions (feelings) upon deciding to stay
- impact of emotions on choices and behaviours
- interview structure - opening, discussing, closing
- asking scary questions
- listening between the lines
- the hazards of assumptions - yours - theirs
- the dangers of bias - to data quality and quantity, and reporting
- reporting accurately - respecting safety
- who owns the data - long term security
Duration
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