See If You Agree: Stay Interviews Represent the Third Type of Question

When I am
giving keynote speeches to executives, I often say there are only two types of
questions at work:

         1. Did you do your work?

         2. May I give you more work?

That second
one is usually an instruction instead of a question, but you get the point. And
the bigger idea here is our managers are conditioned to talk only about work in its many forms like assignments,
metrics, projects, and deadlines…and of course missed deadlines. We help them
with supervisory training under topics like “situational leadership” and “conflict
management”, again to help them manage through some of the difficulties when
talking about work.

I keep
italicizing work because work is all we ever teach our
supervisors to talk about. And then we tell them to build positive
relationships and more importantly to build trust…and to find a way to do this
while talking about work.

The hole in
the donut here is why don’t we ever teach our supervisors to ask about their
employees’ needs instead of just talking about work? Sure, our supervisors naturally say phrases like “How you
doin’?” and “Any questions?”, but we make a major, major assumption that
through all of this work talk they
have enough skills to initiate conversations about topics that our employees
really care about… regarding their lives and their work. 

This is
precisely why Stay
Interviews have become so popular. Some say “Better to ask them why
they stay instead of waiting to ask them why they are leaving” and this is
true…but trite phrases like that miss the big-picture point. Stay Interviews
cut turnover and improve engagement because they
drive supervisors to talk with their employees about work issues that matter to
each individual employee, from that employee’s
point of view. And sometimes about non-work issues that matter, too.

I’ve long
said here that one massive reason why (1) turnover is at its all-time high and
(2) engagement is completely stuck throughout this century is because we fail
to see that one-size-fits-all employee
programs don’t move either metric.
It’s OK to have recognition programs and any events with food, as long as our
expectations are low that neither impacts how our teams view our companies long
term. To do that we need to find a way for our supervisors to connect with
employees individually, on topics that
matter to them.

There are
nearly 7.5 billion people on this earth, and through the miracle of DNA we are
all different. Someone might have your nose but they don’t have your mind.
Asking one unique person who we call supervisor to connect in a trustworthy way
with each of seven or more other unique people who report to that supervisor
every day is a high and probably impossible challenge. This is the
long-awaited, unique advantage that Stay Interviews bring…and why we
desperately need a third type of question. 

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