Stay Interview Questions: What to Ask Before Good People Leave

Most organizations ask their best questions on an employee’s last day. We sit down in an exit interview and finally ask what was frustrating, what we could have done better and what would have made them stay. The answers are often thoughtful and useful, and they arrive exactly when they can no longer help.

A stay interview turns that around. You ask the same questions of the people you most want to keep, while they are still here. In my experience running healthcare staffing companies, where keeping good people is the business every week, it is one of the simplest and most underused retention tools a leader has.

Why do stay interviews work?

They work because most people who leave were never asked. Good employees rarely announce that they are unhappy. They quietly decide that nothing will change, and then they answer a recruiter’s message. A stay interview interrupts that story by showing someone, directly, that you notice them and care whether they stay.

They also give you specific information instead of guesses. Engagement surveys tell you about averages. A stay interview tells you that one particular person wants more flexibility on Fridays, feels stuck without a path forward or would love to train the new hires. Those are things you can actually do something about.

The questions to ask

How do you run a stay interview well?

Keep it simple and keep it human. Tell the person ahead of time that you would like twenty or thirty minutes to talk about their work and what would make it better, so it does not feel like a surprise or a warning sign. Hold it somewhere private. Do not combine it with a performance review, because people will not be candid about what would make them leave if they think it might affect their evaluation.

During the conversation, listen far more than you talk. Resist the urge to explain or defend. If someone tells you the schedule is frustrating, the right response is “Tell me more about that,” not a description of why the schedule is the way it is. Take notes so they can see you are taking it seriously.

The follow-up is the whole point

A stay interview without follow-up does more harm than no stay interview at all, because it tells people you asked and then forgot. Within two weeks, go back to each person with at least one thing you did or are working on. It does not have to be big. A schedule tweak, a training opportunity, a conversation with another department or an honest explanation of why something cannot change yet all count.

When you cannot give someone what they asked for, tell them that too, and tell them why. People can handle a no. What wears them down is silence. I wrote about that same idea in a patient experience setting in People Can Handle Bad News. They Struggle With No News., and it is just as true for employees.

Who should get a stay interview?

Start with the people you could least afford to lose, and then work outward. If you lead a large team, have every supervisor do them with their own direct reports, because the relationship with the direct leader is where most retention is won or lost. I made that case in People Quit People, Not Companies. A good rhythm is once a year for everyone and a little more often for new hires during their first year, when people are most likely to leave.

Stay interviews connect directly to the five SPARK drivers in my culture keynote, You Are Capable of a Better Culture: Support, Purpose, Appreciation, Relationships and Knowledge & Growth. Almost every answer you hear will land in one of those five places. For more on retention, see my Inc. article Inc.: Stop Building Fences to Keep Your Employees.