Keep Top Talent: 7 Stay-Interview Questions that Work
Retention is a topic on everyone’s mind. With 2014 being the year of the employee, taking measures to retain your best and brightest should be on the top of all leaders agendas. Daniel Pink always starts with, “Pay competitively and fairly”. In other words, take pay off the table as a concern.
Why Stay Interviews?
What can you do next? Jennifer Miller proposes the use of stay interviews, as do I. Ms. Miller suggests, “Want to prevent future flight of your top talent? Don’t wait until it’s too late: conduct a “stay interview,” an idea popularized by the book ‘Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay,’ recently released in its fifth edition.” Stay interviews show your top talent that you mean business, that you are invested in their future with you. Using them as one tactic of a retention strategy is a smart move. Before embarking on this course, ensure you have a strong communication vehicle in place so your organization understands what you are doing. This allows for and fosters more trust along with setting you up for more likely success.
7 Stay Interview Questions
Here are 7 stay interview questions to ask. They are simple and straight-forward, but elicit a rich discussion.
- Why did you come and work here?
- Why have you stayed?
- What would make you leave?
- What are your non-negotiable issues?
- What about your manager(s)?
- What would you want to change or improve? (and what could your manager/leader change or improve)
- Anything else that is important to share? What else had you wish I had asked?
What to Do After the Interviews
The key is once you have the data, sorted and themed, leverage the information to build programs and approaches that can help with retention; take immediate actions where required or get back to those employees asking for particular deliverables with honest, direct feedback. Senior managers or leaders of groups and/or departments should conduct these interviews. The head of HR can also conduct them, and even a President or CEO.
However, if you don’t do anything with the data after collecting, then you will have wasted a lot of time conducting these interviews. Showing good faith efforts afterwards is as important as having the interviews. Ms. Miller’s article highlights, “According to research released recently from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, these proactive career conversations were identified as one of six talent-management practices that companies use to boost employee engagement.”
There are numerous types of retention efforts, but stay interviews involves employees, managers, top leaders, and HR. It gets the whole of the organization into ensuring your best and brightest stay.
Why not start these today?
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As the CEO & Founder of East Tenth Group, Michelle leverages 25 years of business and experience as a strategic advisor and executive coach to help drive actionable people solutions and provide practical insights on business strategy to senior leaders. she and her team and are fiercely committed to the development and growth of people and companies because we believe that when people thrive, business thrives.
