Article 2 in Series
As a follow-up to the article “Shifting Talent: The Great Resignation, quiet quitting – Still a bold opportunity for most,” many questions continue to arise about possible interventions to retain top players.
Trends show that employees crave trust, flexibility, freedom, and effective communication. Gallup Research advises that;
“52% of voluntarily exiting employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.”
The Academy to Innovate HR, AIHR, based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is an innovator in HR education and skills enhancement. Recently they have expanded on myHRSP’s work and extended the focus areas to consider reviewing with your team members during a “Stay Interview.” This has quickly become an indispensable tool to keep current employees.
What is it?
Unlike the term stay interview suggests, it’s not intended to keep employees from leaving, at least not primarily. Instead, it’s about gathering valuable feedback and improving employee satisfaction and engagement. Conducted with current employees, it aims to shape the critical last impressions employees have of the company – and the image they’ll portray to the outside world.
Why do you do it?
Improving employee retention
Implementing a simple employee and peer recognition program might be enough to solve this issue, boost employee engagement and, by extension, improve your employee retention rate.
Getting valuable employee feedback
Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion, is an often-heard quote. You may think that you know why people love working for your company; their fantastic colleagues, challenging projects, great culture, or maybe all of the above.
You don’t know until you ask.
Boosting employee satisfaction and engagement
Stay interviews can be a helpful engagement strategy.
There needs to be a trusting relationship between the manager and the team member if the latter is to honestly talk about what doesn’t work for them.
How to conduct a stay interview
While launching a stay interview program will usually lie with HR, more operational leaders should be requesting such support from their HR Teams, as it will be the line manager that often conducts the interviews.
The steps to get you there
1) Start small. Don’t conduct stay interviews with every employee. Instead, focus on your long-term, at-risk employees, high performers and high potentials.
2) Do not add the stay interview to the performance review cycle; have them as a separate activity. The informality of the stay interview will improve your results.
3) Schedule all stay interviews within a relatively short period, allowing you to gather all the feedback and act upon it without leaving it unaddressed for too long.
4) Determine who will lead the stay interview. Line managers/supervisors most likely have the most substantial, most trusting relationship with their people. I would caution leaders to refrain from outsourcing this activity to their HR team. This is an excellent opportunity to build a stronger, more dynamic relationship with your team members.
5) Consolidate all information in the same place by getting your HR Team involved. The information gathered should be summarised & analyzed in a consistent method to take action, if necessary.
6) Summarize. Before wrapping up the interview, managers should summarize the employee’s critical reasons for staying or leaving to avoid misunderstandings. This is a crucial opportunity to reinforce to your team, in their own words, why they want to remain with you.
What to ask?
To maximize the conversation, focusing on broad categories will be helpful to surface any areas that will increase the retention of your team. The five core areas of focus;
Gauging employee satisfaction
The job
The company culture
The work environment
The technology
A simple place to start:
What part of your job would you eliminate immediately if you could?
This will help you minimize the not-so-great parts of the job for your current employees.
Do you feel valued and recognized in the company?
If your company is good at making people feel valued and giving them the recognition they deserve, it will positively impact people’s engagement and productivity.
What do you feel we should change or add to our offices?
You are gaining knowledge of any physical barriers within your environment that impact your team’s performance.
What software/tools should we stop using right away?
Over time, our technology evolves. However, our business processes may have yet to. As a result, awareness of technologies and software that may become redundant/repetitive tasks for your team. Surfacing this information will assist in smoothing out workflows and removing frustration from your team.
Whether known to you, a significant part of the global workforce is thinking about leaving the company. The stay interview is a positive method of recruiting your current employees to remain with the company and building and sustaining relationships at work; consequently, taking a thorough look at your employee engagement and satisfaction should be a priority.
Comments