Tuesday 11 October 2011

STAY INTERVIEW VS EXIT INTERVIEW


It’s a new trend to conduct Stay interview in order to avoid an Exit Interview in a business organization. When job-hopping has become a common practice and when employee retention has become a critical issue, every company wants to know about those factors that can keep an employee engaged and committed, and stay interviews help the organizations in gathering these hard facts.
Stay Interview
What do you like about your work?
What would keep you here?
What makes for a great day at work?
Is there anything you would like to change about your job?
Do you feel supported in your career goals?
Do you feel we recognize you?
What kind of recognition do you like?
Stay interviews are becoming a trend and they are used to reinforce good HR practices within the company. The concept is based on the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, which states that people who are given attention are a motivated lot. The employee needs to be heard since they feel good about being heard.
Employers have tough time in order to retain their employees. Traditionally, organizations used to hold exit interviews with employees who were resigning in order to get their perspective on the organization and the work culture; it was of not much help to both the employee and the employer.
Listening to the Employees
Exit Interview is aimed at asking employees at the time of quitting why they are leaving. By that time it’s late. Stay interviews have been used all along but under different nomenclature - in the form of appraisals and consulting sessions. It is an employee sensing exercise, to detect early warning signals, to know about compensatory expectations so that the company can make a proactive correction at the right time before the employee announces that he/she is leaving.
Exit interviews find out why employees leave, while stay interviews focus on what makes employees stay with the company, and thereby an opportunity for the company to do more of those things employees like most.
The objective and purpose of conducting stay interview is primarily to listen to the employees’ views, aspirations and comfort levels, to identify the areas of improvement and read the pulse that is to map the expectations of employees. It is a “pull” strategy rather than “push”.

Conducting Stay Interview
A stay interview should aim at sensitivity listening, collecting feedback from employees, identifying the strengths as well as areas of improvements, developing trust and confidence with the employees and ensuring freedom of expression and problem sharing.
The concept of stay interviews is in-fact has an empowering approach. Stay interviews focus on what is going right, rather than what went wrong. Stay Interviews can help in attracting and retaining the right talent.
The need of Stay Interview is felt when the corrective action taken after exit interview is not able to contribute much on identifying the real cause of attrition. In some of the cases when the decision was deferred by addressing the significant few reasons of quitting the job, the insignificant many tends to pile up to backfire. There is a need for constant engagement with employees. Stay interviews help making employees feel appreciated and motivated.
Contrary to exit interviews, stay interviews are conducted to understand the reasons why the employees wish to continue working for the organization.
Stay interviews should be conducted once in six months. However, this depends on the size of the organization.
Stay interviews are more proactive, focus on the positive emotions of people who are enjoying their stay in the company and are able to point to things that the company is doing and should do more of because they are very happy about those things.
The huge challenge of retaining talent can be solved to a large extent by adopting the concept of stay interviews and understanding the psyche and needs of the employees.

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