Keeping the Love Strong: Four Reasons to Conduct Stay Interviews
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we thought it would be a great time to talk about relationships. Not romantic relationships (that’s not on our list of services), but another important type of relationship—the organization-employee relationship. Like any other relationship, the organization-employee relationship is one that needs to be invested in and actively maintained in order to be long lasting.
Like any other relationship, the organization-employee relationship is one that needs to be invested in and actively maintained in order to be long lasting.
Unfortunately, some organization-employee relationships end sooner than desired and to understand why the relationship ends and how to avoid a similar occurrence in the future, organizations often use exit interviews. Exit interviews involve asking an employee who has recently quit questions regarding why they chose to leave. The downside to this method is that it requires a relationship to end in order to obtain the necessary data. Instead of waiting for an employee to leave, another method an organization may choose to use is a stay interview. Outlined below are four reasons why your organization may want to consider using stay interviews instead of, or in addition to, exit interviews.
It’s not too late. An exit interview requires that an employee leave for the organization to gather data regarding reasons for employee turnover and whether any changes can be made to enhance employee retention. This means it is already too late to save that relationship. While the data gained from an exit interview can be used to save future relationships, a relationship has already inherently been lost. The loss of this relationship can be of great detriment to the organization depending on that person’s role, experience, and relationships with their coworkers and other staff. Conducting stay interviews allows the organization to use a more proactive approach that may help avoid this loss.
More data. Since exit interviews are only conducted with those exiting the organization, you are only hitting approximately 9-13% of the organizational staff (average voluntary turnover rate based on the SHRM 2017 Human Capital Benchmarks Report). Given that this is such a low percentage of overall staff, the findings may not accurately reflect the attitudes and perceptions of all employees and may not be considered generalizable. In order to ensure more meaningful interventions, the organization must wait to collect enough data to produce valuable patterns and insights. Given the slow trickling nature of this data, this could easily take a few years for smaller organizations. Conducting stay interviews allows you to collect a representative sample of data in a short amount of time, allowing for faster and more meaningful interventions when needed.
Increased honesty. Depending on the wording of the questions, the individual conducting the interview, and the confidentiality agreement, there can be differing levels of honesty in both exit and stay interviews. One might think that exit interviews would produce high levels of honesty seeing as the individual leaving has nothing to lose, right? However, exiting employees still have plenty to lose. Most employees want to leave their employers on good terms to ensure positive references and connections in the future, thus decreasing the chances that they divulge any overly negative feedback regarding their experience at the organization. Since stay interviews are more positively focused on why employees choose to stay, the information is less emotionally charged making it easier for them to share honestly. In addition, even if an organization promises confidentiality to an exiting employee, there are often feelings of distrust in knowing that their data could be easily isolated. With stay interviews the amount of data being gathered at once increases employees’ feelings of confidentiality.
Positively oriented. As alluded to above, stay interviews are more positively oriented. How often does reflecting on something negative make you feel good, or reflecting on something positive make you feel bad? What we reflect on has a major impact on how we feel. When staff reflect on the positive aspects of their job and organization, they also inherently feel more positive about their job and organization. Therefore, stay interviews can both be used to gather data for the organization and as a motivational tool to reinvigorate the staff’s buy-in and commitment to the organization. Not only does this help increase positive sentiments among the staff but leveraging positive aspects of an organization is far easier than quickly correcting for major weaknesses. While it is still important that organizations work to identify their weaknesses, as these can ultimately cause an employee to separate, stay interview data provides a great opportunity to quickly leverage strengths and increase employee commitment.
These are just four reasons as to why you should consider incorporating stay interviews into your practice in order to keep the love strong between your organization and employees. Be sure to take some time to consider how you plan on investing in the organization-employee relationship this February. If you have any questions about how your organization can utilize stay interviews, stay surveys, or other ways of keeping relationships strong within your organization, feel free to reach out!