As an employer, you understand that sometimes it’s inevitable: a high-performing, engaged and motivated employee gives their notice. Despite your best efforts to build trust with your team, you may find yourself wondering what steps you could’ve taken to prevent your best and brightest from taking a new position. Even worse, morale among your entire organization may suffer after your employees have to pick up additional responsibilities – all while you spend your time – and money – looking to fill your open position.
In today’s highly competitive labor market, preventing turnover is more important than ever. Knowing how employees really feel – about what they like (and dislike) about their positions, what keeps them engaged, whether they feel they have an opportunity for growth – is critical to retaining talent. EANE members not only have access to specialized training and resources for employers looking to learn how to create and refine their talent management strategy. Our retention services include the ability to conduct stay interviews with existing employees and exit interviews with employees leaving your organization.
What is a stay interview?
A stay interview is a one-on-one interview conducted between one of our HR professionals and an employee. Quite simply, the goal of a stay interview is to learn what makes your employees – whether just one valued employee or your entire workforce – keep working for you. But at EANE, we know that well-conducted stay interviews go beyond helping pinpoint trends in what keep employees engaged. These interviews can also elicit information in what could make your most valued employees want to leave your organization.
Taking the initiative to interview employees about their satisfaction can help build trust. A stay interview is not designed to be a performance evaluation. A stay interview goes beyond other forms of talent management, such as employee satisfaction surveys, to create a comfortable, safe environment where employees can share their immediate thoughts, needs and concerns about any number of talking points, from overall company morale to whether or not they believe their opinions are valued.
When one of EANE’s HR professionals conducts stay interviews with your organization, we take every step necessary to ensure we collect the right information from the right employees. That way, we put you in the best position to make data-driven decisions that can help retain your most valued employees and build the best team possible.
Exit Interviews: Don’t brush off what your former employees have to say!
Just because an employee is leaving doesn’t mean their opinion doesn’t count. While your soon-to-be former employee may be willing to provide open, honest feedback to a certain extent, the risk of closing the door on a future relationship with your organization may prevent an employee from sharing his or her true feelings.
That’s where we can help. A good exit interview goes well beyond simply understanding why an employee has accepted a new position. When executed properly, exit interviews create an open, honest environment that allows the employee to articulate their true experience working at your organization. Understanding the true experience of your departing employee can help you learn about morale across the organization and help prevent other employees from leaving under similar circumstances.
It can be difficult knowing what questions to ask during an exit interview – or who should conduct the interview itself. That’s where we can help. Our HR professionals can help customize this process to work both for your organization and for the employee who’s departing. Contact the EANE team today to learn more about our stay and exit interview services.