Human Resources leaders have known for a long time that the way to retain your employees is to communicate with them. No surprise to me that we are now hearing about a new trend in 2022 called stay interviews.
What exactly is a Stay Interview?
A stay interview is about understanding why an employee would leave or stay with your organization. In the simplest terms, the leader of the department asks employees about their likes and dislikes working at the company, including working in the team, with their colleagues, and their leaders.
The meeting would involve a series of questions to learn more about employee intentions. Questions like:
- How am I (leader) doing as your leader?
- What more do you need from me to succeed in your role?
- What do you need to do more of to succeed in your role?
- How would you rate the company as a whole?
- Are you getting the training you need to stay?
- What will keep you here?
- What would you change about your job or the company?
- How are you getting along with your fellow teammates?
- What good thing happened to you this week?
- What bad or negative thing happened to you this week?
Considering The Great Transition, retention is a huge, relevant topic. It’s up to all leaders to ask difficult questions to encourage their employees to stay with the organization. Listening to employees has never been so important and acting on these responses (both negative and positive) is necessary to keep your employees engaged, motivated and excited about coming to work each day.
Are stay interviews the next big trend for HR in 2022? Time will tell. For now, it’s time for leaders to be ready by attending training on how to ask difficult questions, have difficult conversations and how to act on them. We need to start showing employees that they are valued, listened to and that the organization has their best career interests in mind. With the goal of employee engagement in mind, conversations like stay interviews should be happening regularly.
Anne Bloom is a Principal with The Osborne Group (an interim and contract executive consulting practice) where she is a contributing member of the Human Resources practice.
