Preventing Surprise Resignations With Stay Interviews

A Forbes article told the sorry story of a manager losing a top employee out of the blue. One of those “everything seemed OK and then he quit” examples every manager has endured.

Employees Have Much to Tell

This story leaves me empty…in the sense that the employee had so much to tell, maybe about specific duty wants and needs, colleagues good to work with and not, a particular interest or career choice. The compelling question is “Why did you look?” except asking it is too late. The horse, or in this case the employee, has already left the barn.

Coincidentally, Forbes published an interview with me, and the Senior Contributor Bill Conerly made this key point:

For most managers talking to employees is a task without a deadline. And for some, it’s a task without a deadline outside the manager’s comfort zone! How good are any of us at tasks without deadlines outside our comfort zones?

Effective Managers Consider What Employees Have to Say

I have to wonder how effectively the manager in our story asked about the employee’s interests and needs and in doing so could that employee have been saved. Consider throughout your career if the following statement is true or just kind of funny:

There are two types of meetings at work:

Did you do your work? and Here’s more work.

I think more true than funny. In fact, not funny at all. We tell managers to build trustworthy relationships with employees but then we drill down on numbers, relying maybe on engagement survey results or turnover statistics as our “people metrics”. Throw in some generic training like situational leadership, then tell them to just be themselves…and make those numbers.

Effective Stay Interviews Bridge the Gap to Build Trust

Stay Interviews have rocketed in popularity because they work, slashing turnover and improving engagement. Combined with the Goals and Forecasting pieces of Finnegan’s Arrow, the manager would not have been blindsided and would have already known if they had a good chance at saving the employee. And I am certain, without any doubt, that if the manager in our story had conducted a Stay Interview with the employee who left, the story would have ended better.

C-Suite Analytics foundational belief, built on scores of academic studies, is the following is true:

• The #1 reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss.
• This does NOT mean each time an employee quits it is because she doesn’t trust her boss…though that might be true.
• It DOES mean each individual leader becomes your very best employee retention solution.

So if “boss trust” is the driving force for retention, how does each boss build trust? The obvious answer then becomes by making each employee’s day better…and not worse.

Here’s proof. Stay Interviews are a major part of the solution we offer clients for cutting turnover by 20% and more…and often times as high as cutting turnover in half. The concept is simple but smart, that if employee turnover is based on how much employees trust their boss, then those bosses need an interactive way to build trust. And that interactive way must be based on topics each manager can control. So our five questions, the SI 5 as we call them in-house, must address day-to-day issues that a first-line manager can change. Here are the SI5:

1. When you travel to work each day, what things do you look forward to?
2. What are you learning here?
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?

Our research tells us these are the right questions to ask…to learn what your employees think about after work and what they talk about over dinner.

When managers ask these questions, then listen, take notes, and probe to learn more by converting five questions to twenty or more, then build individualized stay plans for each employee, they are the key to building the trust that leads to company turnover decreasing by twenty percent or more.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More, No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 20% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.