Episode 4: Stay Interviews

Why stay interviews are important to a thriving workforce and how to conduct them.

Introduction 0:08

Welcome to the leading from the ground up podcast. I'm your host, John Hall. Welcome to Episode Four, I wanted to start this one off a little bit differently by talking about a situation I've recently had to deal with which is finding a new barber shop after going to the same one for a little over 20 years. As a child, I experienced neighborhood barbershops with my father. These were places that men would gather from the neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods and get to know each other talk. They would talk about situations that are going on in their lives, they would joke they would tell tall tales they would grace the young children with knowledge that we didn't realize we were getting at the time. It turned into pretty much a second home. We got to know other men in the neighborhood and it was a place to bond with other men to bond with our fathers and this was a situation and a culture that I wanted to show my sons something that I wanted my family to understand that still existed in our culture today And it is difficult to replace that when you lose it. The one that I found over 20 years ago, I found just before me and my wonderful wife got married and we got to know the the barber that we met 20 years ago Ron and he became a member of our family. He knew our children he talked to them about their education, He talked to them about life situations, He had pictures of my oldest curled up on a shelf in his barber shop asleep when he was when he was a young kid, no more than maybe a year and a half. he decided to retire just after COVID broke and had the opportunity to close this shop up and take his wife and his and his grandson and move to a place where he can just relax and enjoy life from that point on because of some fortunate circumstances that happened for him. I am grateful for that and for him but it leaves a hole in our family and with the situation of having to find a new barber shop. I've gone to a few and the culture that my kids are used to and the culture that I'm used to and the the surroundings and the environment that they're used to is very difficult to find. You’re probably wondering how this fits into the episode today. Well, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could develop an environment and a culture at work with our employees, with our subordinates in our businesses in our in our employment that they want to foster that type of environment anywhere they go from the point that they leave us or that they liked that environment so well and they want to stay in it as much as they possibly can.

So let's talk about stay interviews, why they're done and how they benefit the organization and the employees that we are conducting the stay interviews with or our current employees. They benefit the organization by understanding why a person is a continual employee for you. They benefit the organization by knowing what direction the employee is going where their head is in relation to the organization itself, and how well the organization is doing and communicating with the employee. How it benefits the employee is the employee gets to sit there and have an honest conversation with a leader and they get to explain what they enjoy about being employed by by your organization they get to it gets to talk about what things that they would like to do in the future. They get to talk about what you can do to help them out. So this is something that definitely bleeds over from a growth plan. It is definitely not the growth plan. It is an interview that you are going to conduct with with individual employees. There may be times when you want to do these in small groups. I would highly advise against that considering that it takes away the personal element of the reason you're doing it.

What is a Stay Interview 5:38

So what is the stay interview as the interviewer is an opportunity for you to ask employees questions that that one gives them the opportunity to to answer truthfully just as I said before, gives you the opportunity to sit back and listen to what they have to say because this honestly this interview is about them, not about you just as stated earlier that the questions that you ask them to find out why they are actually employed with you or why they continuously stay with your organization. You want to make sure that you're listening to their answers, you're taking good notes and you're getting to the root of what they're really trying to say and you're not, interjecting your opinion into what they're saying it is your opportunity to listen to them. It's their opportunity to to express how they feel about the organization how they feel about the leadership. In these are usually straightforward questions that don't bleed into anything confrontational.

Why are Stay Interviews Important 6:56

So, where this ties into the barbershop analogy in the beginning, is that the culture that I talked about before is a level of loyalty, It's a level of respect, It's a level of understanding and it's an environment where you can say things and get some honest feedback. And yes, it's also an environment where you're going to get some some healthy banter back and forth but that's not really where the stay interview comes in. It's all these other things that allows the employee to be open about their answers. They're comfortable with the answers that they're giving because they already realize that they are valued and this is your opportunity to show that they are valued.

How to Conduct a Stay Interview 7:48

Why should you conduct these interviews? It's an opportunity for you to understand what you're doing right in your organization. It's also an opportunity for you to demonstrate how important you think the employees are. This is an opportunity where you get to show employees, how much you actually care about why they work for you, Why they come to work, what they enjoy about work and care about the responses that they're going to give you based on the questions that you're asking. it's an important aspects of keeping people in your organization when they believe that you care about them. As stated in previous episodes, caring about them as individuals and what they're getting out of working for you and ensuring you know why they're there. They're hired to do a job but we want to make sure that we understand what we are doing right, so we can continue to do that. And then we also want to understand where we have some areas of opportunity that we can tweak some things to step our game up a little bit as leaders and as employers to make their jobs easier to make them more productive to make them more effective.

When to do Stay Interviews 9:17

Now these interviews should be done one on one in person. As I stated before, I advise against you doing them in small groups, you tend to lose some of the personal aspects of doing this interview. You want to schedule a minimum of 20 minutes to do it. It may take you an hour per employee to do this. So you don't necessarily want to schedule them all on one day. You want to give them ample opportunity to answer these questions thoughtfully and completely as possible for them. So you want to schedule adequate time for them to do this. You also want to schedule enough time for you to review what they've said to you, to write it down as completely as you possibly can and to review what they've said to you and some time for you to have some thoughtful reflection on what they had to say. Make a plan on how you can change things to one make their job easier as stated before, and to improve on whatever areas of opportunity that they may have brought up in the interview with questions that you've asked.

Organizational Benefits of Stay Interviews 10:39

Another aspect of this is employee engagement and retention. We want employees to stay working for us and we want employees to be engaged more than they currently are. This is an opportunity to help increase that engagement, This is also an opportunity to increase what we are doing to keep them there. Obviously we're not trying to tie them up and hold them in our our businesses but we want to build them up, We want to make them better, We want them to be more engaged than they currently are. We want them to to grow into bigger, better positions within our company but we want to know what we could do to help them out to do that. We also want to know what we're doing right so we can continue to do that as stated before. And we also want to know how we can improve ourselves so that we can make the environment that much more better for future employees and for newer employees who are just coming in who may not be able to answer these questions as in depth as a more seasoned employee.

How to Conduct a Stay Interview 11:47

Here are some examples of questions that you should probably ask or could ask him at stay interview. After each one of these questions, it would be a good idea for you to take some time to think about how you would answer those in your current employment or if you were an employee of your own business. Number one, what do you look forward to coming to work? The last stay interview that I remember doing, I had difficulty answering this question beyond just “it’s my job” and that threw me for the rest of the interview. My leader at the time didn't have enough experience to redirect me or come back in and ask in depth questions. The leader just wrote down the answer that I gave and went on to the next one. The next question you could ask is what are you learning here and what do you want to learn? The next question after that could be something like Why do you stay here? Because we definitely want to know what we're doing right to keep them employed with us, or why they show up to work every day. So the next question you could ask could be “when was the last time you thought about leaving us and what prompted that”. If they thought about leaving the organization we want to know why, we want to know what is it about the their current role, their current situation or current culture that is not agreeable to them and why they've thought about leaving us. Another question could be “what can I do to make your job easier”? We want to know if we can provide tools or resources to help them or assist them in their current role and we want to make their job easier so that they are more engaged, more effective and they're better prepared to do roll as best they can when they show up to work every day.

Conclusion 13:52

The point of all this is for you as the leader, the owner of the organization or either or both, is to simply listen. We don't take anything that they say or the answer that they give personally. We want to learn from what they say. We want to see any answer that they give us as an opportunity for us to improve or an opportunity later on for us to pat ourselves on the back because we're doing the right thing We're doing something something good. Remember that the interviewer is about them. And we remember we want their honesty when they're answering these questions. We don't want them to be guarded and think that they are simply answering the question to get through the process because they are afraid to say what they truly think. If we have an employee who is disgruntled and doesn't want to be there, we want to know why we want to meet that person in the middle, We want to meet that employee in the middle. We want to figure out what we're doing to to create that environment and we want to figure out whether or not this environment was created by something else other than what we were doing as leaders. So listening is a starting point. Being as proactive with asking these questions or conducting these interviews is to our benefit and letting our employees know that we actually care about why they are there. That we value them as important members of our team is the main purpose of this. It is a level of communications and I said in the first episode that communication is going to be a focal point for this entire podcast, that everything centers on our level of communication that we have with our employees. As leaders we set the tone if we show up in a terrible mood, it's going to set our employees in that same direction. So when we show up, we have to get our minds right, we have to know what we're working on that day. We have to communicate with our employees as best we can. We have to give them the information that we have that makes their job easier and we have to be as transparent with them as we possibly can. Until next time. Thank you. Thank you for listening and continuing with me on this journey.

As always, if you have specific questions that you would like covered in an episode, please send those questions to john@apertureadvising.com. Until the next time Remember, I believe in your ability to lead from the ground up.

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