In today's competitive business landscape, organizations cannot afford to lose top talent. Yet employees choose to leave and look for better opportunities. Realizing the need to keep valued employees, many organizations are conducting stay interviews.

Most organizations conduct exit interviews when their employees are about to leave the company. By then, it is too late to understand the reasons and take necessary steps to keep the employee. Stay interviews are periodically conducted. They track the general mood within the organization to understand the employees' perspective.

Here are some ways in which stay interviews can help you keep your best employees.

Understand What the Employees Want

Lack of communication causes several problems at most workplaces. Managers often overlook the importance of interacting with team members. As a result, they have little or no understanding of what their employees want.

One-on-one interviews are a good platform to discuss their role and career aspirations. Closer interaction can bring a lot of new insights to the table and enable you to reach out to valued employees. 

Identify Potential Problems in Advance

Most employees take the decision to leave after a lot of deliberation. If you can identify the issues prompting them to think of quitting, you can resolve them and keep your resources. One-on-one stay interviews give you the opportunity to identify problems that can get bigger.

Explore New Ideas Together

Driven employees can bring new innovative ideas to your team and organization. Let them share their ideas with you. You motivate them to explore more challenging and rewarding opportunities within the company. They feel they can grow professionally without looking outside the organization. You can inspire them to open up at the interviews where you can talk to each of your team members. 

Take Necessary Actions to Help Employees Stay

Stay interviews give employers the scope to take necessary actions, in time.

If an employee expresses concern over their present job, you can discuss new roles within the company. Or if an employee feels they are underpaid, you can explore the possibility of increasing wages.

More Time to Address Issues

You get enough time to identify problems and look for their potential solutions. Stay interviews are more relaxed and focused on identifying problems and their solutions. You have the time to go through the challenges and take necessary steps to address them.

Discuss the Positives

Treat one-on-one interactions as a platform to discuss things that are working. You can encourage your employees to discuss aspects of their job they enjoy and opportunities they value from you. A positive dialogue can help you motivate your workforce and give them the encouragement to stay with you.

Stay interviews address the communication challenges that distance employers from their employees.

Businesses are operating in a highly competitive market today and losing valued employees is not an option. Interviews are helping managers to reach out to team members on time and discuss issues in a more personalized way.

What’s a “stay interview?” How can they help employee engagement, while keeping your best employees out of an exit interview or exit survey? 

We’ve recently come across this new practice, which is used by some companies to hold onto their superstars. Basically, you’re sitting down for a frank discussion with employees who are at risk of being poached, or leaving for other reasons.

“They are a direct opportunity to prevent flight risks from leaving, but they are also a deep dive into engagement,” said Lenore Lambert, director at The Interview Group, told www.hcamag.com.

“So other than targeted retention, they are a useful follow-up tool for engagement surveys, targeting staff in areas that are less engaged and identifying specifically what needs to be done to get the best from people.”

This pre-emptive strike can help you hold onto your top performers, while gaining insights into what might help you retain the rest of your staff.

This is a relatively new idea, so there is no real data to show the success rate or any other numbers to support the stay interview’s impact on turnover or retention. However, the idea is a good one. And properly executed, it could make sure your best employees remain YOUR best.

If you have any questions about what exit surveys or employee engagement surveys can do for your company, please contact us any time.

Your time with the company is winding down. Do you treat the exit survey or interview seriously? Or do you treat it as just one more thing you have to take care of before you leave.

Many experts believe that you should treat the exit survey or interview very seriously. Yes, it helps the company’s future, but you may not realize what it can do for yours.

“Participate in an exit interview if you want a good reference in the future,” wrote Bob Wilson in an article at wgntv.com.

Wilson is a managing partner at OI Global Partners, and feels taking this last chore seriously is crucial in leaving on good terms.

“Treat the exit interview as seriously as a hiring interview and focus on the benefits the new position presents for you and your career – and not the shortcomings of the job you are leaving or anyone working there.”

This could be the last bit of official business you take care of with this employer, so it’s important to leave a good impression. If you have bad things to say, be sure to offer them as constructively as possible. If you have good things to say, be sure to use them to bookend the bad things.

If you have any questions about what exit survey software can do for your company, please contact us any time.

We recently came across some unfortunate findings from a study about the exit survey and interview process. A recent poll suggests that as many as 24 per cent of Australian and New Zealand employers will ignore the feedback from exit surveys or interviews.

These findings come from a recent white paper called “The Exit Process -How To Gain Valuable Insights To Build a Better Workplace,” from the firm Robert Walters.

“While 70% of hiring managers use the feedback to make improvements to the business, almost a quarter, a significant minority, just file the feedback away with the candidate’s resignation letter,” said the report.

To ascertain these numbers, Robert Walters surveyed more than 300 hiring managers and more than 700 professionals across Australia and New Zealand.

Their findings also show that 63 per cent of respondents have been asked to complete a formal interview. In terms of how useful they found it, respondents were split down the middle with 37 per cent saying, “Yes, it was useful to me and the company.” Another 36 per cent said they did not think it was worthwhile. 

If you have any questions about what exit survey software can do for your company, please don’t hesitate to contact us any time.

The practical use for the exit survey isn’t limited to the business world. Top colleges and universities can benefit from the results.

For example, the US - Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has revealed that 87 per cent of Indian MBA students who graduated this year were placed in top companies, based on the results they acquired from an exit survey from graduates.

The GMAC exit survey of graduating management students was conducted among students in 129 business schools around the world.

Schools and educational organizations can use the exit survey as a tool to see:

• What students thought of their experience
• Where schools are succeeding
• Where students could use more guidance
• How students are fairing in the business world

An online exit survey can be filled out remotely, so it’s far more effective than an exit interview. It can be sent to students across the world at any time. This means you can easily send it to students from a year or so ago, to see how their career is going and if they’re working in the sector they trained for.

If you have any questions about what exit survey software can do for your organization, please don’t hesitate to contact us any time.