While many companies perform exit interviews and performance evaluations, few organizations are using stay interviews as much as they should. Whether you’re using stay interviews in your 1:1 talks or during formal goal setting, these interviews are a great way to understand what your workers want and how you can help. By incorporating stay interviews, you can enhance your corporate culture and avoid getting blindsided by employee departures.

What Is a Stay interview? 

A stay interview isn’t the same as a career path interview. In a stay interview, you focus on the employee’s roadblocks and how you can help them in their day-to-day tasks. These interviews are different from exit interviews because you conduct them with your active workers. 

In a stay interview, you’re trying to learn what employees like about the company and why they stay with you. Then you can use that information to improve employee retention. 

While stay interviews are incredibly useful, many companies aren’t actively using them now. During the “Employee Retention” episode on Mission to Grow, Mary Simmons discussed a recent conference that only had HR professionals from medium to large companies. When she brought up the subject of stay interviews, around 70% of the HR professionals didn’t know what a stay interview was.

Part of the reason these interviews aren’t getting used is because of how new they are. According to Simmons, “Employees want to know you care about them. The problem is, when we do evaluations, they’re waiting for the shoe to fall.” They’re waiting to hear how large their raise is, so they aren’t in the right frame of mind to do a stay interview. 

To carry out effective stay interviews, there are a few options you can try out.

• 1:1 Meetings: You can arrange 1:1 meetings between managers and employees to ask stay interview questions. This is a great option because you can set up meetings that are exclusively about stay interview topics, which prevents any distractions.
• Check-In Meetings: Check-in meetings are essentially a kind of 1:1 meeting where a manager or team leader checks in with each worker. While these are normally short meetings, you can still use them for your stay interview questions. You can even divide up stay interview questions between different check-in meetings so that you can gradually ask all of the questions.
• Formal Goal Setting: Some companies offer formal goal-setting meetings. These sessions are a great chance to get feedback on what it’s like to work for your company and how your business can improve. 
• Performance Reviews: If you don’t have another opportunity for stay interviews, you can always incorporate them into your performance review. However, workers may be worried about their review or a potential raise, which can prevent them from focusing on stay interview questions.

Best Practices for Stay Interviews

For your stay interviews to be as effective as possible, there are a few tips you should follow.

• Pick the Right Time: You need the employee’s total focus, so schedule it during off-peak hours.
• Prepare Your Questions in Advance: To make the most of the stay interview, plan your questions in advance. You should ask each worker the same questions so that you get a good overview of your workforce’s opinions and attitudes. 
• Use Active Listening: Pay attention to what the employees say and use active listening skills. 
• Make Them Feel Safe: If workers don’t feel safe speaking up, their answers won’t be as useful or honest.
• Create Actionable Responses: When there’s a problem, you can use the stay interview to build an actionable response.
• Take Notes: During the stay interview, take notes about the employee’s answers so that you can follow up later.
• Check Back: Whether you act on a worker’s concern or not, it is a good idea to report back to the employee about the status of their feedback and any actions the company will be taking.

The Importance of Stay Interviews 

If you aren’t doing stay interviews already, your company is missing out on an important tool. With the help of stay interviews, you can enjoy a number of benefits.

Facilitate and Encourage Dialogue

Often, employees feel uncomfortable bringing up problems they have with your company, such as issues with job-related benefits or career plateaus. Unless you directly ask your workers important questions, you might not discover problems and make necessary changes. By talking to your employees during stay interviews, you can avoid getting blindsided by someone quitting.

Understand What Workers Want 

During a keynote speech in Copenhagen, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Gary Vaynerchuck discussed the importance of listening to employees for your company’s job retention. “One of the biggest things I see in businesses and entrepreneurs failing is the overreliance on an employee that leaves. And then they have to start all over for 18 months or are completely crippled by it. And the thing that could have allowed them to mitigate that disaster is literally a conversation. If you’re not a big enough man or woman to hear the feedback, you’re going to lose anyway.” 

Listening to your employees has a disproportionate ROI. With a minimal investment of your time and resources, you can quickly increase your employees’ happiness. In turn, this increases their speed and productivity. 

Boost Employee Satisfaction

When workers feel like they’re valued and listened to, they’re naturally happier. Plus, the changes that you make due to the stay interview will help to improve employee satisfaction. It’s impossible to fix a problem unless you know that it exists, and stay interviews are an important way to discover hidden issues.

Increase Employee Trust 

When you demonstrate that an employee’s opinion is valid and important to you, it helps you earn the employee’s trust. Heightened trust encourages loyalty to your organization.

Improve Retention Rates 

According to Simmons, “Having a good HR function in this area directly saves you time and money. Whenever you have more money, you grow. Whenever you have more time to grow your business, the business grows.” By identifying and mitigating retention risks, you can improve your turnover rate.

Enhance Your Company Culture 

Stay interviews are an opportunity to improve your company culture. They allow you to ask important questions about what it’s like to be an average worker at your business. Many people quit their jobs because of a toxic company culture. Stay interviews can improve retention by helping you spot and remedy cultural issues.

Examples of Stay Interview Questions

Each company is different, so there may be some variance in the types of stay interview questions you ask. For example, you’ll likely want to ask questions about how new HR programs are working. If a problem was reported in the past, you’ll want to ask follow-up questions.

• What excites you the most about your current role? 
• How do you prefer being recognized for doing good work? 
• What would make you more satisfied in your job? 
• How happy are you with your work-life balance? 
• What motivates you to wake up and come to work each day? 
• As your manager, what can I do to support you better?
• What do you like the most and least about working here? 
• Do you feel valued for the work you do? 
• What do you like the most or least about our company culture? 
• Do you feel like you have enough opportunities for growth and development here? 

Do You Conduct “Stay Interviews” To Uncover Employees’ Perspectives?

Stay interviews offer a number of important benefits to organizations. In particular, their impact on retention rates can lead to significant savings on training and recruiting costs. Because of this, stay interviews are strongly correlated to faster business growth. 

At Asure, we have hard data to support the benefits of stay interviews. In our 2024 HR Benchmark Report, we asked 1,065 businesses about whether they used stay interviews. Afterward, we asked them about what their growth was like during the previous year. The results showed a 47-point spread between fast-growth and zero-growth companies. 

• 36% of zero-growth businesses conducted stay interviews.
• 73% of fast-growth businesses conducted stay interviews.

These numbers reflected one of the larger spreads in our whole survey. When we focused on just companies that had 25 workers or less, the spread jumped to 46 points. Either way, the survey results clearly showed that the fastest-growing organizations are clearly using stay interviews to improve their HR practices and business growth. 

Learn More About Using Stay Interviews at Your Small Business 

Unlike some HR tools, stay interviews are extremely easy to incorporate into your company. You can use 1:1 or check-in meetings to ask stay interview questions. Once you’ve gathered your results, you can use the interview to improve the way you manage employees. 

If you’re interested in using stay interviews to improve your retention, our HR professionals can help. Learn more by contacting our small business HR experts today.