How to Run Effective Stay Interviews

Stay interviews are not just to keep employees who are thinking about leaving. They help HR and leaders gather employee insights to build a better organization.

Juli Prizant, founder and president of OptiPeople Resources, explains how stay interviews compare to exit interviews and engagement surveys, who should conduct them, and what to do with what you hear. Juli has spent more than 30 years building people systems for growing companies.

Key takeaways from this

• Stay interviews or exit interviews? It is not an either - or.
• Stay interviews or engagement surveys? Engagement surveys give you an organization-wide pulse. Stay interviews are more targeted and work well during change, new leadership, or high turnover.
• The interviewer should be someone employees trust to protect the information they share. That is often HR or an outside party, since people rarely tell their manager or their boss's boss everything.
• Juli calls them "tell me more" interviews, which avoids implying that only flight risks are being interviewed.
• Set expectations up front. You will listen and look for themes, and some concerns won't be fixed. Substantive issues like harassment or leadership problems still get addressed.

00:00 Intro 00:51 Stay interviews vs exit interviews 02:04 Who should conduct stay interviews 03:05 When to run stay interviews 03:42 Stay interviews vs engagement surveys 05:22 Reframing them as "tell me more" interviews 05:52 Interviewing flight risks and everyone else 08:35 Stay interviews for hard-to-fill roles 10:08 When an employee says "don't apply" 11:34 When a stay interviews feels like blackmail? 13:20 Setting expectations at the start 15:06 Juli's top stay interview questions 16:12 Turning interviews into trends 19:05 Act on feedback or don't ask 19:38 Where to find Juli

Find Juli Website: https://optipeopleresources.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianne-juli-prizant-8a57321/ Other links: https://www.julianneprizant.com/ (speaker and advisory site). Her blog, OptiInsights, is on her OptiPeople Resources website.

Find Andrea (me) Website: https://thehrhub.ca/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-adams1/