Improving Employee Engagement & Retention Through Stay Interviews

Stay interviews are an important means of re-recruiting your workforce – because what attracts your employees is often different from what will keep them. Stay interviews tend to improve engagement and productivity - as well as retention. In this webinar, you will learn how to prepare for, conduct & follow through on stay interviews.

#1. The Objective of a Stay Interview

• Making employees feel valued & improving engagement, productivity & retention
• Reinforcing good relationships, forging new ones & helping repair those that are strained
• Re-recruiting talent, causing employees to feel valued & enhancing the relationship between an employee & his/her manager

#2. What Stay Interviews Are

• Employee/supervisor meetings to uncover what is important to each employee
• Means of learning why employees stay might leave & what their supervisor can do to improve their work experience

#3. Why Stay Interviews Are Not

• Performance appraisals
• Conducted only when problems arise
• Personal development
• Causal, random discussions

#4. Initiating a Stay Interview Program

• Who should conduct the interviews & why
• Training managers & leaders
• Setting retention goals

#5. Scheduling & Conducting Stay Interviews

• Frequency & length of each interview
• Preparing for an interview
• The most effective stay interview questions
• How to probe for candid responses
• Handling employee responses for which you don’t have an immediate answer

#6. Following Through on Your Stay Interviews

• Creating & documenting action plans
• Sharing accountability for the follow-through
• Following up on the action plans
• Forecasting future turnover

Turnover today is rampant because employees can be choosy with:

• The lowest unemployment rate in 48 years
• For the first time ever in the U.S., there are more job openings than eligible candidates
• Over half of U.S. employees say it is 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' they can find a job as good as the one they have 50% of employees & 60% of millennials considering new employment opportunities the average tenure for employees in their 20’s being less than 18 months

And turnover is expensive with the cost of replacing a:

• $10-hour employee over $3,000
• $30-50,000 job over $8,000
•  Replacing a $100,000 often over $200,000

However, engaged employees when compared to unengaged employees have:

 » 65% less turnover in low-turnover organizations and 25% lower turnover in high-turnover organizations

Any Leader, Manager, or Supervisor [HR, Production, Accounting, Sales, IT, etc.] – who wants to increase employee engagement and/or retention.

Pete Tosh is the Founder of The Focus Group, a management consulting and training firm that assists organizations in sustaining profitable growth through four core disciplines:

• Implementing Strategic HR Initiatives
• Maximizing Leadership Effectiveness
• Strategic Planning
• Enhancing Customer Loyalty

The Focus Group has provided these consulting and training services to manufacturing and service organizations across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the Middle East. Pete has worked closely with the leadership teams of organizations such as Exxon, Brinks, EMC, State Farm, Marriott, N.C.I. YKK and Freddie Mac

Pete holds a B.A. degree in Psychology from Emory and Henry University and Masters degrees in both Business Administration and Industrial Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. Pete also co-authors Leading Your Organization to the Next Level: the Core Disciplines of Sustained Profitable Growth.