The Power of Stay Interviews for Retention & Engagement

All of us regularly survey our employees for job satisfaction, “no doubt” consistently receive the same types of suggestions (i.e. more money, better training, better communication, etc.) and then often follow up in standard ways to drive employee satisfaction (e.g. Town Halls, pay incentives, contests, etc.)…but the # 1 reason employees leave or stay is based on how much they trust their Supervisor. This session, presented by Dick Finnegan, author of C-Suite Analytics, presents the “Stay Interview” as a compelling tool to significantly reduce turnover.

At their essence, stay interviews are short (5 questions long), regularly conducted, strategically managed by all internal stakeholders within an organization, and designed to build deeper one-on-one relationships (and trust) between Supervisors and their employees.

Traditional contact center environments don’t give Supervisors the appropriate time to gain a comfort level with the 15- 18 agents on their team. Typical Supervisory goals include (1) make your numbers and (2) get your agents to like you. Stay interviews, in contrast to weekly scheduled meetings and other performance reviews, are designed to guide meaningful conversation and goals personalized to the individual.

Stay interviews typically include the following questions:

1. What do you look forward to when you come to work every day?
2. What are you learning here?
3. Why do you stay here?
4. When we the last time you thought about leaving our team, and why?
5. What can I do to make your experience at work better for you?

Stay interview “answers” provide the information Supervisors need to personalize their approach to individual agents and/or to improve themselves.

Stay interviews, on their own, won’t solve turnover and retention issues but they do represent one critical factor in the overall process of doing so. To minimize attrition, Dick suggests the following:

1. Dollars = Calculate the Cost of Attrition (e.g. $10,000 = typical cost to lose one agent)
2. Goals = Set Specific Goals to Reduce (e.g. reduce turnover 30% by 12/2019)
3. Stay Interviews = Conduct minimum of once per month, ideally # 1 interview on Day 5 of training
4. Forecasts = Allow Supervisors to forecast attrition (red, yellow, green) based on interview results
5. Accountability* = Tie all Stakeholder Bonuses to Attrition Goals (e.g. Supervisor, Trainer, Recruiter, Team Leader)

*Accountability is key to success—stakeholders should meet on a regular basis to discuss individual agents and how to “get them across the finish line”, whatever that finish line (e.g. 6 month retention, 1 year, etc.) may be within your organization.

After exploring the concept of “stay interviews”, and providing multiple examples of how they’ve helped reduce attrition in other organizations, Dick left us with some bonus thoughts on how to hire people who STAY, which included the following:

1. Get aggressive with referrals, assuming best employees today are referred by others
2. Get “direct supervisors” involved in the interview and acceptance process

Remember, it’s the direct Supervisor that must build trust with the employee for them to want to stay.