Turnover rates continue to plague organizations across industries, sizes, and scales, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that U.S. workers voluntarily quit their jobs at about 36 million per year. Aside from incurring the costs of replacing those workers, the organizations they leave experience predictable, but infrequently quantified, drops in employee production, losses in institutional know-how, partner and customer relationships, and employee engagement that Gallup states leads to almost $1 trillion in losses. While exit interviews aim to understand why people leave and turn those insights into improvements to reduce costs, stay interviews offer a more positive, constructive, and significantly less expensive solution.

Stay interviews have an immediate appeal because they engage workers well before they voluntarily leave, address their concerns and reasons for dissatisfaction, and reconnect their motivation to stay and contribute. At the same time, they are less common: research from Lattice and others estimates that only 27% of companies use stay interviews, while others report higher rates in non-profit organizations. The reasons are numerous, but many can be addressed through the smart use of technology, training, and integration across talent management processes and practices. The critical concepts are proactively engaging with, listening to, and acting on employees and the drivers of their engagement and retention.

Understanding stay interviews

Classically defined stay interviews are structured conversations between a manager and direct report, conducted periodically, and designed to assess the worker’s mindset about continuing their employment. The concept is to engage them in a brief (15-30 minute) conversation to understand their risk of leaving, the issues or concerns they have, and what can be done to address them and therefore reduce that risk. 

These conversations come from research showing that a remarkable (but not surprising to most HR leaders) amount of turnover is preventable. For example, The Work Institute found that 75% of voluntary terminations could have been avoided and were “fixable,” according to the surveyed workers. Similarly, Gallup reported that 42% (and over 50% in previous studies) of departed employees stated that their manager or organization could have taken action(s) that would have prevented them from quitting.

Gallup further offered significant insights that validate the potential value of stay interviews. It found that 45% of voluntary terminations said no one asked them about their level of satisfaction, job performance, or future plans and opportunities in the three months before they left. Of the remaining 55% who did have conversations with their managers, most were not related to retention, with very few reporting discussions about their careers, coaching for greater role impact, job satisfaction, or what they needed to stay. The “preventable leavers” overwhelmingly agreed that their managers could have convinced them to stay if they spent more time providing guidance and coaching, removing barriers and frustrations, supporting their career advancement, or resolving workload issues.

The risks and downsides of relying on manager-led stay interviews

The low adoption of stay interviews likely stems from a combination of managerial effort and compliance with the practice, and significant questions about the validity and value of their output. As classically designed and promoted, these require forethought and preparation, time and effort, and interpersonal skills and motivations that are widely lacking among middle and senior managers.

Managers are less likely to conduct these

Middle managers have been found to be overwhelmed with their duties and responsibilities and, as a result, are less likely to conduct and follow up on these. Research by Gartner, for example, found that they have 51% more responsibilities than they can handle effectively. Other studies, such as one published by the Harvard Business Review, found that “rightsizing” activities across industries has left the average manager with a 2.8X increase in direct reports. As a result, McKinsey found that 44% of managers report they cannot fulfill all their talent-related duties.

The fact is that with more employees to communicate with, and requirements to conduct frequent performance management “check-ins”, semi-annual or annual performance appraisals, separate career development sessions, and individual development planning sessions, the demands on their time are substantial. Their ability to prepare, process, conduct, and document all of these in addition to meeting their budgeting, strategic, and administrative duties is widely viewed as too much. Combined with findings that managerial motivations and capabilities conflict with the talent-related requirements of their roles, they often exercise discretion and spend less time and effort on activities like these.

Relying on managers as interviewers presents risks

Consistent with observations about mismatched motivations and capabilities, the Harris Poll found that 69% of managers feel uncomfortable when communicating with their employees, with 51% saying they avoid those interactions. Requiring manager-employee stay interviews can create issues related to legal risk, the quality of insights collected, and their subsequent supervisory relationships. For example: 

• Legal risks posed by the nature or content of employee concerns (e.g., peer or managerial policy violations, legally questionable actions or decisions), where a lack of proper escalation or follow-up exposes the organization to risk once a member of the management team has been informed. 
• Equally concerning is the risk of giving employees the impression of continued long-term employment by asking about their needs and future, especially during potential layoffs and reorganizations. 
• Leaders may fail to attend to or dismiss individual complaints as invalid, fail to explain why decisions that negatively affected them were made, or act out of self-interest or simple disinterest. Any resulting lack of follow-up erodes employee trust in management.
• Managers’ hesitancy to document and follow up on employee perceptions or concerns that might be viewed as evidence of their ineffectiveness and passed on to their superiors.
• A lack of transparency or honesty by employees, driven by fear or concerns about how it may affect their performance evaluations, merit pay and bonus payouts, and career objectives and aspirations.

Uncovering employee concerns can feel threatening to a manager, as research shows that receiving (and giving) feedback can trigger stress responses similar to facing a physical threat. As a result, when combined with the other issues listed here, the common approach of having managers conduct stay interviews is flawed. 

That said, despite the challenges and risks associated with traditional stay interviews, when properly designed and conducted, they serve as an invaluable leading indicator and proactive predictor of employee retention and turnover. They enable the organization to address employee pain points and strengthen employer-employee relationship drivers before the workers leave voluntarily.

The purpose and benefits of stay interviews

Stay interviews assess employees' perceptions, experiences, and feelings related to an intention or inclination to quit, and the extent to which those might have advanced. Given that, a large body of research has identified what drives employee intent or motivation to leave, including:

• Weakening or loss of trust in the institution or leadership (due to layoffs, unfulfilled promises, or changing circumstances)
• Ineffective management 
• Culture drift
• Weak team dynamics
• Employees not feeling valued or heard
• Low sense of belonging 
• Lack of meaning in work
• Low sense of accomplishment and contribution
• Poor work-life balance

As a result, stay interviews must uncover and address any inconsistencies between an employee’s expectations and their experiences before they create sufficient discomfort and motivation to seek other employment. 

Stay interviews address these concerns by engaging employees in direct, meaningful, and psychologically safe sharing of their observations, opinions, experiences, preferences, and suggestions related to their work, relationships, and work environment. 

The purpose and value of stay interviews include:

• Enabling open and honest information exchanges that support a culture of transparency and authenticity between management and employees.
• Building institutional and leadership trust by listening and acting on requests, preferences, and suggestions that increase employee engagement and commitment.
• Increasing the retention of the most strategically critical and highest-valued employees.
• Generating a deeper understanding of individual employee needs, issues, and motivators to create more personalized retention drivers.
• Identifying trends across employee groupings that represent barriers to productivity, performance, and engagement.
• Detecting significant, but otherwise hidden employee concerns or issues that they were afraid or hesitant to bring up for fear of sending wrong signals about their commitment and willingness to expend discretionary effort.
• Directly educating managers on why employees stay or leave, rather than relying on time-worn, easily dismissed assumptions and overgeneralizations.
• Avoiding regrettable and preventable turnover by listening to and addressing employee concerns.
  
  

More effective approaches for generating employee retention insights and resolutions

Many highly effective approaches to improving employee retention share one critical element: directly and proactively inquiring and listening to each employee. As humans, we want to be heard, understood, and have our perceptions and opinions treated with respect. Like high-quality employee listening approaches, stay interviews should go beyond manager-employee conversations and be supported by multiple methods for collecting insights into employees' intentions to stay or leave. Several methods can help you design and implement them more effectively.

1. Establish an employee retention strategy

Develop a comprehensive employee retention strategy that integrates stay interviews into a cross-HR and talent management approach. Issues that arise in these interviews will inevitably point to compensation issues, managerial skill and leadership development opportunities, performance evaluation and coaching methods, individual skills development, and career mobility programs. As such, define a multimodal approach for continuous, targeted, and measured stay interview data collection, integration, and follow-up/response communication.

2. Establish a formal and repeatable process 

Create a structured, streamlined process that generates consistent, reliable data while minimizing the administrative load for employees and their managers. A disciplined approach that generates the insights needed to flag issues and address them in a timely, transparent way makes it more likely to be a sustainable, widely accepted, value-added listening capability. Design it to be administratively easy to access, respond confidentially, process efficiently with automated tools and reminders, and brief to process with no more than 4-5 questions.

3. Prioritize critical roles and people

Because developing a reliable, consistent, and comprehensive stay interview approach for every employee can be cost-prohibitive and operationally unfeasible, consider using critical workforce segmentation (CWS) to identify can’t-lose roles and employees to target and prioritize. This allows you to prioritize strategically key, hard-to-recruit-and-replace positions as retention targets worthy of more extensive efforts and ongoing check-ins.

4. Launch private, secure, and identity-protected employee listening 

To avoid the downsides and risks of relying on manager-employee interviews, create a proactive, streamlined, and less intrusive approach to direct sourcing of employee information, insights, and feedback. Enable a sense of relative anonymity so that providing any feedback about their direct manager(s) is less threatening and more honest. This is essential given Gallup’s finding that managers account for 70% of employee engagement levels and thus drive or indirectly influence many reasons for leaving. 

Implement mechanisms for safe and full disclosure through (general or targeted topic pulse) surveys. Use these as leading indicators for managers to follow up on, with alerts that guide them when one or more employees’ survey results indicate a risk of resignation, without attributing specific reasons, issues, or blame. Such disclosures can be made even safer and more protective of individual employee issues by combining that data with exit or post-employment interviews and surveys to bolster or better explain the issues driving employees to other employment. Share the combined data with managers as anonymized insights, then follow up with responsive changes and improvements at the individual and team level. 

Communicate the purpose of any surveys, and explain that employee responses to individual survey questions may be aggregated with others, and their data protected, but that combined assessments may be used to prompt their manager to have follow-up discussions.

5. Leverage technology and analytics 

HR technologies and advanced analytic methods together offer a unique opportunity to bypass the need for traditional stay interviews across an organization. Predictive analytics can flag individual employee flight risks using payroll, HR, and operational system data. For example, data on unused PTO or heavy overtime, absenteeism, mental health claims, or EAP resource use can predict employee overwork, stress, burnout, and, eventually, the likelihood of leaving. Similarly, declining individual engagement and wellbeing pulse survey scores, declines in automated offers to take additional work shifts or assignments, or declining acceptance of shared calendar meeting invitations can indicate waning interest in expending discretionary effort and continued employment.

Similarly, surveys generate quantitative insights that can statistically predict turnover inclinations, such as by using selected questions from Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey. Those analytics can flag flight risks and automatically send follow-up prompts to managers or others to check in with specific questions for the individual.

6. Prepare managers and embed stay interviews into their regular conversations

While automated surveys and analytics-based predictive measures can reduce or eliminate many of the risks associated with managerial participation in stay interviews and conversations, they also take away a significant opportunity to build manager-employee relationships and trust. Comfort in asking sensitive questions and providing transparent answers signals a trusting relationship, which in turn lowers the risk of voluntary termination. As a result, organizations should use technology and analytics as alerts for deeper managerial inquiry, coaching, and removing performance/productivity barriers. As a result, efforts and investments in training, feedback and coaching, and leadership monitoring and oversight can yield substantial gains in employee retention.

Training and coaching should be provided on how to:

1. Establish psychological safety and rapport
2. Ask direct, relevant, and non-threatening questions
3. Practice non-judgmental and non-defensive active listening
4. Take notes for follow-up (ideally in digital form)
5. Explain steps that can or will be taken to address concerns or requests
6. Take post-interview action and report back to the employee
   
   

7. Create managerial accountability

As explained earlier, leaders and managers tend to be less comfortable having open and direct discussions with their assigned employees. However, this is a core, essential skill and job requirement that affects both their effectiveness and their teams' performance and productivity. As a result, establish tracking and feedback for managers on the frequency of these discussions, and mechanisms to collect and evaluate employee feedback (e.g., engagement, pulse, upward feedback, or 360-degree surveys). 

Critical employee survey questions should include:

• Whether (when and how frequently) the manager has conducted performance, career, or individual development conversations
• How well the manager listened and responded to any concerns
• How effective or helpful those were
• The extent to which follow-up actions were taken
• The resulting satisfaction with the support received. 

Build these results into managers’ and leaders’ performance expectations, and use them as standards and criteria for merit increases, bonuses, advancement, development plans, and succession status.

8. Compile, integrate, and leverage data and reporting

Stay interview data at the enterprise, business unit, function, and site levels can be just as valuable as for an individual manager and their team. These can identify larger trends that represent friction in the employee experience that the larger organization can address through process and practice design, organization design, workflow updates, development programs, career mobility platforms and technologies, etc. This is possible when a digital/human stay interview ecosystem operates, combining data from HR and operations systems, engagement and pulse surveys, manager-employee follow-on interviews, and other employee listening practices.

Use data from these sources and advanced tools such as GenAI to summarize findings and identify trends for designing improvements related to the employee experience, work or administrative system configuration, process design, policy and practice upgrades, or budget and workload balancing. Engage feedback providers and their teammates in solution generation (using design thinking approaches) by chartering teams that, through the invitations and participation themselves, can drive higher levels of commitment and retention.

Selecting stay interview questions to ask

The key to asking great stay interview questions is to focus on those that indicate or influence retention risk. With a recommended 4-5 questions (which can be built into a library for more varied and targeted use in subsequent pulse surveys), focus on the frictions and barriers to success and longer-term retention that an employee experiences at any point in the performance period or their career.

Select questions based on trends identified in exit interviews, employee complaints, significant changes in organizational structure, operational processes, staffing, or business results, or perceived shifts in employee sentiment. Topics for questions might include:

• What part of the assigned work is most motivating and challenging?
• What tasks would you change or remove?
• How would you assess your work-life balance?
• What skills do you not use or would like to use or develop? 
• What is most important about your work, environment, and work-life? 
• What can your manager do better, more of, or less of to best support you?

After the survey or managerial discussions, look for trends related to:

• Connection of work with mission or strategic objectives (company, function, business unit, team)
• Satisfaction with work responsibilities
• Skill and career development opportunities and effectiveness
• Wellness and wellbeing
• Working conditions (schedule, workload, location, tools, resources)
• Pay or benefits
• Trust in leadership
• Support from manager 
• Relationships with peers 

Managers should work with their assigned HRBP, Manager, or Generalist to develop meaningful and impactful responses that are appropriate and maintain equity across the employee population. 

And of course, the key is to understand how well the organization and manager are meeting those needs, and what that may indicate about the likelihood of voluntary termination in search of them elsewhere.

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