Coaching & Workshops
A stay interview asks your best people what would make them leave while you can still do something about it. This session teaches managers how to run one without it turning into a performance review or a pay negotiation.
Why it matters
By the time someone is leaving, the decision is months old and the reasons have been rewritten to be polite. You learn something, but you learn it about a person you have already lost, and usually too late to help the three others thinking the same thing.
A stay interview asks the same questions while the answer can still change something. The obstacle is not the questions. It is that most managers have never had a conversation with a good employee that was not about performance or pay, and they find it awkward.
What the session covers
In the room
Not everyone, and not annually. We work out which conversations matter most and how often they are worth having.
Practised, because the first one is always stilted and the difference between a real answer and a polite one is mostly in the manager's manner.
Themes across conversations tell you more than any single one, and someone has to own acting on them.
Signs you need this
If you are finding out about the cause at the exit interview, you are running an autopsy programme rather than a retention programme.
If two or three of these are true you are past the point where it resolves on its own. None of them are unusual, and all of them are cheaper to fix than to wait out.
Sound familiar
Afterward
Which is the entire point. The same information, months earlier.
Most have never had one with a good employee that was not about performance or pay.
Individual answers matter less than the pattern across ten conversations.
How it runs
Managers of people you would be hurt to lose. Frequently paired with a flight-risk scan so they know who to talk to first.
Sessions run on site or virtually, and they are built around situations attendees bring rather than case studies from a textbook. You get a fixed fee before we start, and the person who scopes it is the person who delivers it.
Practicalities
Questions
More than you expect, and much more the second time, once they have seen something change after the first.
No. A survey tells you what is happening across the organisation. A stay interview tells you what would keep one specific person you cannot afford to lose.
Managers of people you would be badly hurt to lose. Often paired with a flight-risk scan so they know who to prioritise.
Half a day including practice.
Say so honestly and explain why. People accept a straight no far better than a vague maybe followed by silence.
Once or twice a year for the people who matter most. More often and it becomes a ritual people learn to give safe answers to.
Then you need the conversation happening one level up as well, and we cover how to structure that without it looking like an investigation.
Managers, in almost all cases. An HR-run interview gets more polished answers. The relationship is the point.
Related
Find out who to have these conversations with first.
Retention & Flight Risk →The question that comes up most often in a stay interview.
Career Conversations →Senior-led, delivered by the person you meet
Tell us who you cannot afford to lose and we will scope a session. No obligation, and we will say if one of the others fits better.
Tell us what is going on