Articles on Stay Interviews - C-Suite Analytics

If You Need Another Reason to Do Stay Interviews, #MeToo Is It

Richard Finnegan — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:47:16 +0000

I can tell you scores of reasons why Stay Interviews are right for you and your company, long before crossing the waters toward the #MeToo movement which is loaded with controversy. But let’s muscle directly toward that controversy.

All employees, not just women, need their forum to announce abuse. Abuse comes in many forms with sexual abuse being just one example. Bullying fits in this category as does any action which pits someone with power against another.

I’ve worked in organizations and know first-hand that such abuse sometimes happens at the supervisor level…but sometimes at higher levels, too. The result is employees like their jobs, want to keep their jobs, but learn through very bad circumstances they must accede to weird, uncomfortable demands to keep their jobs. Those demands at the extreme are about sexual activities, but sometimes are just about taking undeserved abuse from someone whose power exceeds theirs.

Of course, peers and non-manager employees sometimes try to take advantage of their working colleagues, too, by leveraging various forms of authority or just employing a strong personality to coerce or intimidate.

The stories we see in the media are not only about sexual abuse but also about the abuse of power. One example is a woman is sexually approached…and wanting to keep her job, looks for the best way to minimally accommodate and duck. A non-informed outsider would say, “Why didn’t she just say no?” The answer is she had bills to pay, likes her day-to-day job otherwise, and is seeking ways to survive.

Stay Interviews, then, open the door to communication. Some supervisors are in the dark regarding managers above them who are making sexual-favor-innuendoes to members of their teams…or about others doing the same from any corner of their companies. Or those supervisors might be the actual perpetrators and need to be directly confronted.

Further, some supervisors are in the dark about their own behaviors, mistakenly thinking that a comment that seems natural to them is offensive to others. Imagine this scenario where a supervisor asks an employee, “When was the last time you thought about leaving? What prompted it?”, and the employee says, “You are the reason. It’s OK if you tell me I look nice, but it’s not OK if you tell me I look nice in a tight sweater”.

These are the conversations that need to happen. Employees must be invited to confront sexual abuse…and for that matter any type of abuse. And even more so if that abuse is happening at a higher place.

So there are two key lessons here: the first is that all abuse of any type must be reported and addressed…and the second is less obvious and just as important, that sometimes leaders on any level don’t understand how their actions could be misconstrued and hurtful and that a compliment is more than a compliment…and someone needs to tell them.

There is no perfect fix for increasing communications to overcome abuse. Stay Interviews, though, open another door of communication, and one that is not tied to performance or a review. Requiring your managers to introduce them provides each organization with a better, more informed way to open up conversations with their employees and brings abuse of any kind into the open. Once that occurs it opens the doors to get HR involved to stop it.

Schedule a free one-on-one strategy session with our team and we will listen to your concerns, probe deeply to learn more about your workplace needs and work together to find solutions to cut turnover and improve employee engagement. https://go.oncehub.com/TeamFinnegan

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Stay Interviews, Probing, & “We Need More Staff”

Richard Finnegan — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 15:29:56 +0000

Some managers give a knee-jerk twinge when asked to conduct Stay Interviews, to meet with their individual employees to learn how to make their jobs better. They instinctively fear a rebound response of something they can’t control like pay, promotions, schedules, or time off. Or this one which we’ve learned is the most dreaded of all:

“We need more staff.”

I can easily see why a few managers fear the worst when they anticipate conducting Stay Interviews with their teams. Their minds move to that one employee, past or present, who continually harped on a pet-peeve subject you couldn’t say yes to, some immovable object like “Get the CEO to see things right”.

To set our thinking straight, the by-far #1 thing employees ask about during Stay Interviews is ways to improve their own work processes…ideas like….stop building reports nobody reads, or asking you to hold other employees or departments accountable for getting their work done correctly and on time. These types of “make-me-more-productive-and-end-my-frustration” suggestions have consistently led the pack of all employee concerns. And what manager wouldn’t want to know how to make their team produce more and better work?

But let’s travel back to needing more staff. Learning to train managers to conduct effective Stay Interviews has opened the door to leveraging probing to find the absolute best solutions. “Need more staff” provides a great example because to some employees this is a simple request that deserves the required, simple, knee-jerk response: “Yes, in fact I’ll get two new positions approved instead of just one”.

Let’s be fair here. Employees have never experienced the struggle of getting a budget approved, surviving the compulsory request to shave a pre-determined percent of your overall expenses off the top after you think your budget is approved, and then the pre-meeting shudders of building the justification to hire someone who is not in that budget. Plus the intimidation of knowing your request will probably be rejected and your manager might think you a wimp for bringing your add-more-staff request in the first place. To your employees getting more staff is simple math: We work hard, we can’t get all of this work done, we deserve more help, and you should get it for us.

When caught off guard by a surprise request like adding staff, we train managers to probe deeply to solve completely. Probe to learn more, to dig deeper into the issue, to see precisely how your employee sees this issue, and don’t try to immediately solve it. Probes here would include those about specific work processes, work distribution, individual team member performance, eliminating other work, asking another department to share the work, and more. And by probing and listening, you just might find the solution inside…and your employee will learn that a simple request is not so simple.

Schedule a free one-on-one strategy session with our team and we will listen to your concerns, probe deeply to learn more and work together to find solutions to cut turnover and improve employee engagement. https://go.oncehub.com/TeamFinnegan

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How Can Stay Interviews Build Trust?

Richard Finnegan — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 15:22:25 +0000

Often people ask how can a manager who hasn’t built trust do so by conducting Stay Interviews. We usually then rattle off the four skills we train managers to use: listen, probe, take notes, and take responsibility. They wonder what the latter means but presume they fully understand the first three, including listen.

Most people, though, think listening is akin to hearing. Or sitting silently while maintaining eye contact and bobbing one’s head. In other words, giving someone the full floor to speak without interruption.

We give the greatest indications of listening, though, when we speak. This might sound counter-intuitive, but what we say after someone has spilled their guts matters the most.

Good is when we tell them we heard what they said. For example, a manager may repeat back the employee’s words, “You said you needed 3 more days to complete the project and I understand your reasons why. Did I get it right?”

Better though, is to identify their emotions. Building onto the quote above for example: “You seem really frustrated by this project, and I know that’s not a good feeling. So, you need three more days to finish it and I understand why. Did I get it right?”

Listening for emotions versus just hearing

The difference is listening for emotions shows you care about the person versus just the project. Our brains are designed so that all incoming information from the five senses hits the base near the spinal cord first and then moves onto the limbic system. That name isn’t important but this is: all incoming information reaches the emotional part of our brain first. Think about it: if you smell a good smell you first think it’s a good smell, then later where it came from.

Some of us move information from our limbic system to the part of our brain that controls rational thinking quickly and some move more slowly. But all of us have those moments where we stay emotional for a while, over a project, a relationship, or whatever. This is when we are most vulnerable to others making us feel better, or worse, and building relationships from that point on.

Here’s a good rule going forward. When anyone approaches us about any subject they are emotional about, their emotions are the main event and the subject is second. So, addressing their emotions shows we care, helps them express them to us, and then clears the way to address their issue. This leads them to trust us more.

Think about the most emotional encounter you had in the past week. One example would be a customer who says something like, “My order was to be ready yesterday and it’s STILL not ready!” A good response would be:

“Sir, you seem really frustrated about us being late and I would feel frustrated, too. Let me tell you what we did wrong and how we’ll make it better for you”.

Not so good would be “Let me tell you why we’re late.”

The difference of course is recognizing the customer’s emotion. The same method works with bosses, spouses, kids…everyone. Because universally we all want to be heard, and when we’re emotional we want our emotions to be acknowledged.

Can managers learn to build trust when conducting Stay Interviews? Absolutely, yes, as long as they practice good listening skills during training and then put them to work.

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Stay Interviews vs. Millennials? Stay Interviews Work!

Richard Finnegan — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 13:22:20 +0000

Companies large and small pour dollars and sweat into solving engagement and retention for millennials by hiring consultants, sending HR to conferences, and conducting focus groups… all trying to find the secret sauce to motivate these alien creatures.

Here’s a better, easier, at-your-fingertips answer. Just ask them, one-to-one.

My eyes roll when I scan the plethora of studies about what millennials want at work. Here’s an example from the Harvard Business Review, telling us the top things millennials look for in a job:

Opportunity to learn and grow
Quality of manager
Quality of management
Interest in the type of work

Little additional detail was provided. My gut response is, “I’m glad I know this. Now what do I do with it?” If we all gathered around a flip chart to build one engagement and retention plan based on this report, what would we write?

Assuming this report is accurate, the next-step data we need includes:

How does each millennial learn?
What does each millennial want to learn?
What qualities do each millennial want in a manager?
What exactly is “quality of management”, as seen through the eyes of each millennial employee?
How do we define “interest” for each millennial?

The key word here is “each”. Perhaps the greatest reason we have difficulty engaging and retaining millennials is we keep searching for the perfect-but-unattainable, one-size-fits-all solution, as though millennials are all the same. I’ve been led to believe even aliens are different from each other.

Which brings us to Stay Interviews, one-on-one meetings supervisors conduct with each individual employee to build engagement and retention…and to build trust. In fact, trust is the one quality research tells us every employee wants, regardless of age or any other demographic.

Stay Interviews out-perform employee surveys, exit surveys, millennial surveys, focus groups, and all other “representative” ways of gaining employee data…for the clear reason that each person is different. Consider this example regarding a millennial employee at a client company. During his Stay Interview he asked this:

If you want to do one thing to keep me, let me come in an hour early and then leave an hour early on days when my boy has his little league games. Then I’ll work as hard as I can and stay here a long time.

No survey or focus group would have told us that. And it’s no surprise that this client company has seen turnover fall by 45% by implementing Stay Interviews and solving the unique needs for each individual employee.

So if you are worried about millennials, stop the focus groups and one-size-fits-all programs…and implement Stay Interviews instead.

Source: https://hbr.org/2016/05/what-mi llennials-want-from-a-new-job

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Attention Non-Profits: Stay Interviews Work For You, Too!

Richard Finnegan — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 15:30:21 +0000

Deloitte said recently that U.S. companies, including non-profits, are spending $1.53 billion each year to improve employee engagement and retention. I would suggest we substitute the word “spending” with “flushing” to make it more accurate as Gallup says employee engagement has shown no improvement for 15 years.

One thing non-profits cannot afford is to “flush” money away, especially on where the majority of money is spent without showing improvement: engagement surveys, exit surveys…and then more engagement surveys and more exit surveys. One way or another, vendors have convinced us that surveys improve engagement and retention. They don’t of course. They just give us data but no solutions.

Here are the facts, and some of them are hard to swallow. Employee turnover is higher in non-profits than the corporate sector and the number one concern is keeping qualified staff with limited budgets.¹ So the data from employee surveys and exit surveys say employees want more engagement, but employees don’t stay or engage more for employee-of-the-month events or more town hall or team meetings. Nor are most employees motivated by better benefits. What they are motivated by is having more engagement with a manager they trust. Hard data proves this.

Whether you are non-profit or not, a direct, can’t miss way to improve trust is for leaders on all levels to conduct Stay Interviews. And the good…no, GREAT…news for all companies, including non-profits, is that once managers are trained or certified in Stay Interviews, the cost to use over and over becomes zero. No surveys, no reports, no new programs or team action plans. Sometimes simple is better and this is one of those times.

Stay Interviews are structured discussions a leader conducts with each individual employee to learn the specific actions she must take to strengthen that employee’s engagement and retention with the organization. Structured means ask 5 specific questions, followed by probes to learn all you can. Leader means first-line supervisors and no one else because those supervisors must build trust.

Here are the 5 questions we’ve built on research and have confidence in:

1. When you travel to work each day, what things do you look forward to?
2. What are you learning here? Want to learn?
3. Why do you stay here?
4. When was the last time you thought about leaving our team? What prompted it?
5. What can I do to make your experience at work better for you?

Importantly for non-profits, there are no costs once leaders are trained. No surveys, no detailed reports, no new employee programs. Just leaders from each level using their training in Stay Interviews to talk directly with their employees one-to-one as to why they stay and what could keep them longer.

Try this! You’ll be glad you did, now and a decade from now.

1. 2016 Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey^TM Results. Copyright © 2016 Nonprofit HR. All Rights Reserved.

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Can Stay Interviews Solve U.S. Military Turnover?

Richard Finnegan — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 05:30:55 +0000

Most of us have never considered the U.S. military having turnover problems…and for that matter haven’t seen the words “military” and “turnover” in the same sentence.

The short answer to the question posed here is “yes”, in the eyes of senior military officials. A few months ago I was approached in a book-signing line by a military “retention specialist”, sent to hear me speak by his commanding officer, and from there our talks began. Your initial thoughts might match mine which were how can enlisted soldiers quit, and what variables are there among them. Aren’t they all treated exactly the same with pay, benefits, and opportunities?

Several meetings later, a fascinating trend emerged. The re-enlistment rate correlated with how much each soldier trusted his or her commanding officer. Those who built solid, productive, caring relationships led more soldiers to re-enlist, while those who looked more like commanding officers we see in movies…the tough kind…had far fewer soldiers choose to re-up.

The key learning point is this: First-line leaders who build trust increase their odds for retaining those employees they want to keep, and those who fail to build trust are rolling the dice. And I am confident soldiers refer to their substandard leaders as “jerk bosses” or worse, just like your employees do.

So here’s the question to ask yourself first, and then ask it to your top executives: If the only variable for military retention is leaders building trust with their teams, doesn’t that direct us to hold leaders accountable for their talent and provide trust-building tools, too?

The best trust-building tool is Stay Interviews, teaching leaders to ask our 5 essential questions, creating best practices with stay plans, and then forecasting how long each employee will stay. We’re looking forward to applying these proven employee retention solutions with our military and I strongly, strongly suggest you do the same.

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7 Reasons to Choose Stay Interviews

Richard Finnegan — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 21:25:59 +0000

Stay Interviews are both more effective and more efficient than other retention initiatives because they actually lead to improved engagement and improved retention. Here are seven reasons why:
Reason #1: Managers conduct them and not HR…and we know now that leaders on all levels drive engagement and retention with their direct reports.
Reason #2: Managers then provide solutions that are individualized, one-on-one, rather than program solutions that are one-size-fits-all but don’t fix anything.
Reason #3: Managers learn to ask the right questions and then probe deeply for the absolutely most important issues for each employee…rather than have superficial “How’s it goin’?” hallway conversations.
Reason #4: Aggregated data leads to company-wide fixes for work/life balance and other white-hot issues…and is fresher and more reliable than any engagement survey results.
Reason #5: Never again will an employee’s exit cause you to say, “Had we only known this, we could have fixed it”.
Reason #6: Stay Interviews are targeted to both continuing and newly-hired employees…and data tells us that fixing engagement and retention issues early leads to longer engagement and retention overall.
Reason #7: Engagement and retention solutions happen from the bottom up rather than tops-down or from HR on the side…and most if not all of the engagement and retention action happens with each employee’s relationship with his supervisor, peers, and duties; this is where the engagement and retention action happens!
And here’s a bonus reason, #8: Stay Interviews will teach your supervisors to build trust…or teach you and your executives that they can’t build trust.
One other way to apply Stay Interviews is to supplement your engagement survey process. Since surveys bring data but no solutions, ask your supervisors on all levels to conduct Stay Interviews as part of their survey action plans. Then they can dig deeper into survey results and develop solutions that address the needs of the group and also for each individual employee.

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The BIG DIFFERENCE Between Stay Interviews and Development Plans

Richard Finnegan — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:23:02 +0000

Most organizations script a few questions about development as part of their annual performance reviews, and a few even ask managers to establish development plans with employees as a separate step. It is easy, then, to assume Stay Interviews are synonymous with development plans and therefore companies can by-step Stay Interviews if these other ways are in place.

This is like saying, “The only thing that matters to our employees is learning and getting promoted. Nothing else is important to them”.

Over many years of coaching managers to conduct Stay Interviews, I’ve been struck by the many, many topics that employees surface as important that most of us would not have expected. Here are a few:

One high-performing employee I know addressed issues related to retirement and then stayed on to give another five years of exceptional performance
In several instances employees suggested process or equipment changes to do their jobs better…and these improvements spiked productivity and revenue
Many employees ask for changes of schedules, and in some cases companies have changed their entire approach to scheduling as a result
Some have asked if they can mentor others which became a win/win/win for the employee, new hires, and the company
Others have asked for specific avenues for input and have then been assigned to projects that make them become stronger performers

These examples remind me of the common refrain from managers after exit interviews which is, “Why didn’t she tell me? I could have fixed that”.

This is what Stay Interviews do. They help you to “fix that” before it’s too late, and to increase productivity, engagement, and retention as a result.

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Don’t You Wish You Knew the Answer to This Question

Richard Finnegan — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:19:07 +0000

Don’t you wish you knew the answer to this question: What percent of your managers actually changed their behaviors based on your most recent supervisory training program?

The question brings intrigue because we assume that head nods and positive evaluations from the program equal improved supervision. But the reality is that once managers leave the room, there is no monitoring, no reporting, and no guarantee that they change anything. In fact, given the difficulty we all have breaking habits the probably change only a little if at all.

This ties to the forever quandary of management trainers. How do we know our work actually does good? That it leads to increased productivity and hopefully even more profits?

The missing pieces can be summed up in one word: process. Years ago I co-facilitated a program for a global consulting firm and the first agenda item asked which matters most when helping a company improve its productivity: Evaluating its products, its people, or its processes?

The answer was processes because all products and people issues are determined by the processes we build around them. It’s really pretty simple.

So traditional management training brings with it no processes for measuring change. We might say that if productivity measures go up, say for sales or service, that’s because of the training. But there are usually many other possible factors for those changes based on typical day-to-day major and minor improvement initiatives.

Stay Interviews bring measurable change in part because they must be implemented as a process. In this case process means providing a hard schedule for managers to conduct Stay Interviews such as once per year and twice for new hires, that they develop and submit stay plans for each employee, and that they forecast how long each employee will stay. This reporting connects to monthly reports that identify each manager by name with their progress against an employee retention goal…and the same type of report can be developed for engagement.

Teaching managers to conduct Stay Interviews and trusting them to do them is a wish. There’s just too much to do. But once they conduct Stay Interviews and see the all-powerful benefits for having done so, most will continue to conduct them without reminders. But it is the process described above that jump-starts implementing Stay Interviews in our organization.

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What Do Employees Ask About During Stay Interviews? Now We Know

Richard Finnegan — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:05:18 +0000

I recently polled several managers from client companies regarding their successes and possible struggles with Stay Interviews. Among the questions I asked were what do employees talk about…and what might you expect them to talk about but they don’t. The outcomes might surprise you.

The Stay Interview method is easy to grasp. Our clients ask five core questions and are then trained to probe to learn deeper information in order to develop an effective stay plan, one that improves both engagement and retention. So employees introduce topics that are important to them and all topics are potentially on the table.

The hands-down most-discussed topic is ways I can do my job better. Examples range from improving work processes to having better equipment to focusing more on job duties that most closely match my skills. These types of discussions were mentioned so often by the managers I surveyed that there was no other dominant topic.

After reading through all they said, I told myself maybe we should change the name to “Productivity Interview” because that’s what these meetings are. Why, then, wouldn’t a manager want to ask each employee how that manager can help the employee become more productive?

The flip side I wondered about was how often do employees mention pay. The majority of managers responded “never”. A few said pay is raised sometimes but never as a primary issue, only as one that is mentioned among others. One hospital manager said whereas pay comes up, her employees also said they could leave for more money for the competitor hospital but wouldn’t leave the intangibles that she and her peer managers bring to their employees every day.

So now we know the most-talked-about topic and it’s “Here’s what I need to do my job better”. This new finding adds to the lore of Stay Interview success stories…and deepens the drive for all companies to shift their thinking from surveys to solutions. And Stay Interviews are the top-tier solution.

You may contact Dick Finnegan at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com

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