You conduct interviews when you hire an individual, and you may even conduct exit interviews when an employee leaves, but are you also conducting stay interviews?
Why They Matter
Stay interviews involve talking to your current team members to assess their job satisfaction and why they choose to stay with your lawn or landscape business.
These types of interviews are beneficial because they can help you with your employee retention and gauge your team’s job satisfaction. Taking the time to talk to employees before they walk out the door gives you the ability to address an issue before it becomes a final straw.
Stay interviews also convey to employees that you care about their opinions and you want to resolve any potential problems they may be facing.
Additionally, stay interviews also highlight what you are doing right in your organization. You can use the feedback to expand upon programs your team appreciates and also market these benefits to new hires as well.
Topics to Cover
What you decide to ask during a stay interview will greatly impact the value you get out of it. Try to ask open-ended questions that allow employees to share their thoughts on the topic rather than a simple yes or no response.
You should touch on their job satisfaction, career development, work environment, work-life balance, and how they’d like to be better supported at the company.
The best types of questions are tailored to that specific employee, their role and express you care about more than their performance alone. Use a combination of questions that address the positives and negatives of your company.
Possible questions to include:
- What’s the most exciting part of your job?
- What factors contribute to you doing your best work?
- How do you like to be recognized?
- If you could change something about your job, what would it be?
- What aspect of your job is the most challenging?
- What talents, interests or skills do you have that we haven’t made the most of?
- What is your favorite aspect of our workplace culture?
- What are some of the motivation factors in your current role that you like best and that you would like more of?
- Are there any policies or practices that could support better work-life balance?
Pitfalls to Avoid
If you decide to do stay interviews, make sure you are committed to having them regularly. If you have new hires, you want to check in with them more frequently to ensure early satisfaction and integration, while with more tenured employees you can check in annually unless there is a significant change to the company or team structure.
Keep in mind that stay interviews are not performance reviews. They should be open, honest discussions in which your employees feel secure voicing their opinions. Communicate this to your employees so they know what to expect and make sure your stay interviews are positive, uplifting interactions. Don’t get defensive when team members make suggestions on how to improve.
Try to schedule these interviews so they don’t take place during stressful, busy periods, as you may not get the objective feedback you’re looking for. Set aside at least 30 minutes for a stay interview so you’re not rushing.
Don’t feel obligated to interview each of your employees on why they stay. You can start with your long-term employees and those who do consistently well on performance reviews, as your A-players are the ones you want to ensure you retain. However, keep in mind that others may feel left out if you only interview the same group of employees regularly.
Also, it is critical that your team sees you following through and making actionable changes in response to their feedback. Failure to fix the mentioned issues will result in employees being demoralized and losing trust in you. While not every issue is something you can act on, make sure you communicate that so staff members understand you’re not simply ignoring their requests.
When you do make changes, acknowledge your employees who spoke up. This will encourage others to share their ideas.
