Friday, January 4, 2008

Stay Interviews

A stay interview is one of the tools for HR professionals as they manage the shift from a tactical to strategic approach.

Tracking and reporting turnover rates and causes after the fact is a tactical approach whereas alerting managers in advance about which employees are likely to quit and recommending effective retention tools is a strategic approach.

Designed and administered properly, stay interviews can provide warning signals and help to identify issues and problems at an early stage. Conducted with new hires, the stay interview may allow an employer to discover workplace issues particularly visible to novices before they too “go native” in the new company. However, prerequisites for success include:
• Conducting interviews on a regular basis,
• Asking open-ended questions, and
• in similar fashion to the “suggestion-box”, creating an action plan and implementing it in a timely manner.

When analyzing stay interviews, it is important to isolate the results of high-performers, especially those in key positions or “at risk” individuals. You must also analyze your low performers to find out what keeps them in your company!

On another hand, stay interviews allow employees to evaluate the employer’s performance and communicate what is important for them to maintain a high quality work life. It should be expected that this feedback loop will become more and more critical as employees shift to Free Agents (professionals who invest their human capital with the expectation of getting a return on their investment in the form of new experiences that can be added to their work portfolio).

Stay interview questions may be found here.

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