Gone are the days when workers stayed with a single company their entire careers. While there are many positive aspects to people switching jobs, sometimes employees just outgrow the learning and development opportunities available within a single company.
However, choosing to leave their employer should not be anyone’s first thought when they want to develop a new skill, lead a team, leave their comfort zone, or try something new. This is why, while indefinite employee retention is perhaps not the best goal, many companies are still actively looking for ways to keep their best people.
Every year, organizations spend a significant amount of budget hiring new talent. With more global opportunities than in previous decades, employers have far outgrown competing with organizations in our backyard. Great workers have more options for employers than ever before.
For many organizations actively trying to improve their retention efforts, the intuitive reaction is to run exit interviews or surveys to “catch people” right as they leave and understand why they are choosing to take their talents elsewhere. While exit surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights, they should not be a substitute for “stay conversations,” whether they take the form of a survey or an interview.
Before we further explore the content and what we believe are best practices, let me introduce myself and QuestionPro Workforce. I am an organizational psychologist and have dedicated my career to helping find ways to make people happier at work.
Currently, I am channeling that passion in my role as President of QuestionPro Workforce, a team that is passionate about working with organizations to help them create a culture where both people and businesses thrive. QuestionPro and I have over 40 years of combined experience in this field. Perhaps I won’t tell you the full age breakdown between the two of us, but I hope we have earned your trust in our credibility.
What are Stay Interviews?
Stay interviews, or stay conversations, happen while a person is still in their job and, ideally, before they show any obvious signs of wanting to leave. They can happen with managers or an HR team member, and the purpose is to gather more information on what is going well in a person’s role and what is not.
This information can be remedied before it becomes so challenging that it becomes a root cause of a person’s departure.
Let’s discuss the best way to incorporate stay interviews into the current employee listening process. There are probably as many nuances to employee listening programs as there are organizations out there. We will lay out a simple yet powerful way to gather information during an employee’s time with the company to make the most of the information you have to strengthen your employee retention.
Organizations ask a number of closed-ended questions year after year in annual surveys. Trending the results of these questions and seeing what has the highest correlation with outcome variables, such as the likelihood to be with the company for the next two years and eNPS, is always valuable. Asking the following open-ended questions on a recurring basis also adds a great amount of value to retention efforts.
Best open-ended employee listening survey questions:
- What are 1-2 things you like the most about working here?
- If there are 1-2 things you could change about last year, what would they be?
- Looking ahead, what is one key thing we can change as a company to help you be even more successful at your job?
- Looking ahead, what is one key thing we can do differently as a company to help you enjoy working here even more?
At QuestionPro, we regularly conduct market research to better understand global employee trends. We have seen great variability in how employees answer these questions among our clients. This is why it’s critical to ask inside your organization instead of assuming that general market patterns also apply to you.
One of the common themes we have seen regarding what employees like in their organizations is their team members and their managers. If this is true for you as well, it gives you an opportunity to check if your employees are uniformly having a positive experience across the company or if there are departments, geographies, etc., where their experience is not as positive, and you can make a targeted effort to improve it.
When it comes to identifying the biggest opportunities for improvement, it is important to check which ones have the greatest impact on stay variables, such as the question “Am I likely to still be working here in two years?” or the eNPS question “How likely are you to recommend Company X as a place of employment to someone you respect?”
Surveys are a great source of information for indicators of where challenges may lie. However, more often than not, organizations have a lot of follow-up questions on how to best understand the areas of challenge and how these challenges, in particular, can be remedied. This is where stay interviews can be a great complement to traditional employee surveys.
The best way to accomplish stay interviews at scale is to ask managers to conduct them on a regular basis. For this to work most effectively, it’s important to set clear expectations with managers and prepare them in the best possible way. Here are several best practices that we would recommend.
Effective Questions for Stay Interviews
In the next section, we’ll discuss the frequency of stay interviews, but let’s say these are done monthly. Here are some questions you can ask:
1. What did you think went particularly well last month?
2. What did you enjoy the most?
3. If there was one thing you could have changed, what would it be?
4. If I could change one thing for you in the next month, what would it be?
Optimal Frequency for Conducting Stay Interviews
The frequency of doing stay interviews can depend on the performance management program in your organization and the cadence of your 1x1s. For example:
What should I do with the information I learn?
Processing and taking action on the information you learn in stay interviews is very similar to reacting to and taking action on the feedback you get.
Asking Stay Questions in Pulse Surveys
In addition to annual surveys and stay interviews, organizations can gain valuable insights from pulse surveys. This is an effective and efficient way to identify if there are any overall changes in employee sentiment, as well as any changes in particular areas of the organization that need to be addressed with urgency.
We recommend that pulse surveys be done anonymously so that employees are more transparent with their input. While pulse surveys are a great complement to and not a replacement for, stay interviews, they can help both with identifying emerging issues as well as signaling to specific managers when they may need to spend more attention on retention strategies within their teams.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and have your best people stay long-term without having sincere conversations with them about their likes, dislikes, goals, and more. But I wouldn’t leave this important decision to chance if getting them to be with you longer could be just a conversation or a few meaningful survey questions away.
I’d love to connect and exchange insights if you’re passionate about discussing workforce trends and enhancing employee satisfaction. Let’s continue this important conversation—follow me on LinkedIn to stay in touch!
