Joe O’Neill – A ‘stay interview’ is a new concept, the opposite of the ‘exit interview’. The stay interview helps retain key employees by uncovering why they continue to be employed in your organization.
Retaining Your Key Employees
Coinciding with the ‘Great Resignation’, it’s also a new tool for any company that needs its key people to perform at an exceptional level to achieve its goals. This concept represents a key foundational block of your company’s strategic plan.
The Importance of Planning
The statistics on the effective use of strategic plans is not great. Few companies develop a strategic plan, or execute if they have one. Regardless of how well you have developed your strategic plan, its important that you develop and manage your key people. Within this framework, the stay interview is a key component. If a strategic plan is only as good as the people assigned to execute the plan, then the stay interview must be a key component.
An article entitled “Why Employees Stay” by Harvard Business Review back in 1973 focused on a study about what’s important to employees. Then, like today, job satisfaction and company environment are important. There’s a good chance they are missing the mark, if a leader believes it’s all about compensation,
It comes into clearer focus when you consider that compensation is not generally the number one reason why people stay. In fact, most often it’s not close to the top. A 2019 LinkedIn Workforce study noted that over 90% of employees are more inclined to stay if their employer simply invests in training to help them do their jobs better. Inclusion, and fostering an inclusive culture is key.
The things that motivate your best employees to stay with your company are the same things that form the guts of a sound strategic plan. Involving your key employees in the development and execution of a sound strategic plan will deliver benefits unto themselves. But a desirable by-product will be improved employee retention.
Ensuring that your strategic plan focuses on the needs of your employees matters, so does involving your key employees in the development and execution of your plan.
Understanding precisely why your employees stay is a critical strategic initiative.