It’s happened again: a star performer submits their resignation and soon after, the wheels of the exit process begin to turn. From the exit interview, you find out the star performer likes their job and the company culture, but they are leaving for a promotional opportunity at another firm. You skim their employment file and past performance reviews for any clues that indicate they were thinking about a dream job just across the river. But you find nothing but the profile of someone who consistently did great work. Now, the top leaders are asking, why didn’t we see this coming?
Many organizations are good at collecting lagging data on their employees, or data that comes after an event has already happened. Exit interview data is this exact kind of data, which tells us why employees are leaving and helps us pinpoint trends and propose solutions to fix turnover. But, the problem with this data is that it comes from employees who are already leaving, and we are left with few options at that point to retain the employee.
A more proactive approach is to get a sense of what is driving or hindering your current employees’ success before they submit their resignations. Stay interviews are conducted by managers with their current employees and focus on what makes employees stay at the company and what may cause them to leave. When done effectively and consistently, the stay interview data can be turned into heat maps that identify employees who are at-risk for exiting the organization. This gives an organization several choices about either retaining that talent or planning for a potential replacement in the future.
During the stay interview, managers ask questions such as, what do you like most and least about working here? If you could change something about your job, what would it be? Where do you see yourself in one to two years? How can I support you in getting there?
A few key differences between stay interviews and exit interviews are that:
- Stay interviews are proactive while exit interviews are reactive. Yet, both approaches provide unique data an organization needs to make smart talent decisions. Just know what you are getting with each approach.
- Stay interviews bolster employee engagement because managers and employees connect over the most pressing issues impacting employee success, conversations which surface issues earlier and more often. Exit interviews are often a matter of formality and are part of an employee’s final tasks before leaving the organization.
- Stay interviews should be done in person while exit interviews can either be conducted by an online, confidential survey or via an in-person interview.
Based on my experience in using stay interviews at a previous organization, they are very accurate in predicting and preventing exits. If taking a proactive approach to reducing turnover and retaining high performers is your goal, consider implementing a stay interview program in your organization.
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Shelly Price is the Principal Consultant and Founder of Human Capital Next, LLC, which focuses on human resources project consulting services and interim support. Shelly specializes in custom training design and leadership development and facilitation, culture assessment and employee engagement, and employee relations. Shelly holds an MBA degree and is certified to use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) Instrument, FourSight® Thinking Profile, and DiSC® assessment. She holds a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) designation from the HR Certification Institute and is an Organization Development Certified Professional from the Institute of Organization Development in Fort Myers, Florida.
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