Making the Case: Why Stay Interviews Are Better

For decades, organizations have struggled to find clear solutions to better engage and retain their best employees. At some point, doesn't it make sense to say, "Why don't we just ask them?"

Well, we do ask them. We ask them through engagement surveys, opinion surveys, climate surveys, and exit surveys. We survey online, over the phone, and with live and recorded voices. These surveys generate reports, and from reports come scores and rank orders, which then become benchmarks. From benchmarks, we set goals to improve our scores on the next survey.

The primary outcome of all of our surveys is that we build programs. To improve recognition we add employee appreciation week and employee of the month. To improve communications we hold town-hall meetings and write better newsletters. To improve careers we hold brown-bag lunches and career fairs.

Our client executives tell us this ongoing survey process makes them feel like a hamster on a wheel. In the beginning, it made sense to utilize expanding technologies to measure employees' opinions as a pathway to improve them. But over time these surveys morphed into redundant administrative processes that lead to few new outcomes. Instead they've become periodic rituals like preparing budgets, leading to jaded comments like, "Is it that time again?"

The good news is that there is a better way to strengthen each employee's engagement and retention, and that better way is simple.

The Good and Bad News about Surveys

Let's look at the ways companies use employee surveys and examine what works and what doesn't work. Exit surveys can be called the original retention tool, as it has long made sense that knowing why employees leave will direct us to retention solutions for survivors. But, though they are based on logical thinking, exit surveys rarely lead to retention or engagement solutions. The primary obstacles are as follows:

* Leaving employees often don't tell the truth.

* Employee participation is too low, in part because surveys are too long.

* Surveys are designed to accept "attendance" and "better opportunity" as reasons for leaving, which fails to trigger solutions.

* Companies are reluctant to make policy or management changes based on "autopsies," that is, the words of employees who no longer work there.

Over the last few years I've polled hundreds of HR professionals to determine if they've ever improved their companies based on exit survey results. The number who indicated they have improved their companies in any way has been less than 1 percent. How many employee hours on both sides of the desks have been invested yet received no outcome? What about the administrative work to generate these worthless reports?

The belief that exit surveys are a must-have tool has been reinforced by vendors who have leveraged technology to make it easier for HR executives to gather survey data. Companies now purchase electronically-delivered exit surveys that lead to pages of reports about how those who leave rated their pay, benefits, communications, and other variables. Too often missing is why the employee left, although there is no guarantee that executives could improve their companies even if they actually knew (see Table 1.1).

Various types of employee surveys have offered hope, too. It again makes sense that learning how employees feel about a number of important items will provide clues on what improvements companies must make to retain and engage them. Again, vendors have made this an easy process for companies to gather data and distribute reports.

The missing piece here is solutions. Survey reports focus on scores and benchmarks but don't tell us how to increase those scores. Benchmarks are worthless because few companies actually know how to improve engagement, so we find false comfort when comparing ourselves to others. And survey scores bring little value unless they report scores for each manager so you can see which managers are improving engagement and which are not. Gallup tells us that engagement has hardly budged since 2000, so we and other companies are clearly on the wrong track. What's worse is the news from Deloitte that we will soon spend $1.53 billion each year to "improve" engagement. The most useful data these surveys provide are about how effectively each individual manager drives engagement for their teams. The surveys fall short on detailing real engagement and retention solutions (see Table 1.2).

Again, the dilemma with this approach is that all solutions are programs. By their nature, employee surveys are confidential, so you don't know what your best performers think, and all data represent average thinking. Further, survey results typically report all items as equal in importance for driving retention and engagement, whether your survey includes twelve items or seventy. The result is that managers focus on driving up lower scores without knowing if those lower scores represent the items employees care about most. And the solutions they provide touch all employees in the same way, regardless of the unique needs of each employee.

One way to measure the effectiveness of employee surveys is to ask, "Will our resulting action plan lead to improved engagement and retention for our top performers?" The real answer is that you just don't know.

The Stay Interview Advantage

A stay interview is a structured discussion a leader conducts with each individual employee to learn the specific actions she must take to strengthen that employee's engagement and retention with the organization.

Stay interviews do three things that surveys do not. They bring information that can be used today, they give insights for engaging and retaining individual employees, including top performers, and they put managers in the solution seat for developing individual stay plans. Gone are the following obstacles to and distractions from implementing real engagement and retention solutions:

* Time delays. It takes time to survey employees, distribute reports, write action plans, and implement those actions. How soon do data become stale?

* Watered-down solutions. Since all data are aggregated into groups, only group-level fixes can be developed, and this paints all employees with one brush regardless of whether they are your best or worst performers.

* Short-term, feel-good programs. Casual Fridays or free coffee check the box...