Conversations with business leaders often include recounting their current struggles with recruitment and retention. Given today’s competitive labour market, these are two areas that are top of mind for many leaders. We recently wrote about 3 ingredients that will help your team members remain with your company. They are what we refer to as the Troika Test – 3 elements working together to create a great result. Can each person on your team confidently state the following?

1. At work, we trust and care about each other.
2. I contribute through my work in ways that are important to me.
3. My work contributes to my life in ways that are important to me.

If you aren’t sure, the way to find out is to conduct “Stay Interview” with each member of your team. The benefits to conducting a Stay Interview are:

• You can proactively flag an issue that could deter a resignation decision.
• You will be more informed about the true state of engagement on your team.
• You can identify easy and quick actions that will help your team.
• Your relationship with each member of your team will get stronger, helping to keep the lines of communication open in the future.

To conduct an effective Stay Interview, keep in mind the following:

1. Be transparent about the purpose of the meeting. Let your team member know that you’d like to talk about what keeps them working with your company and that you want to understand what’s important to them.
2. Take the time out of the day you need to focus your attention in the meeting. While the conversation doesn’t have to be formal, it is not an impromptu or quick conversation in the hallway. Ensure that you have minimal interruption and can be fully present and available to the discussion.
3. Get curious and listen. This is a chance to get to know someone better. One way to know if the conversation was a good one is to check to see if you listened more than you spoke.
4. Be clear about any commitments that you are making and be sure to follow through with the employee.

Questions that you can ask that will get, and keep, the conversation going during a stay interview are:

1. What aspects of work are you particularly enjoying right now? Tell me more about why this is important to you?
2. What do you feel good about in terms of your accomplishments here? What, if anything, is frustrating you about your accomplishments here?
3. How much do you look forward to coming to work each day? What makes you look forward to coming to work?
4. Tell me about your best day at work. What happened during that day that made it your best day?
5. If you could change any one thing about your work at this time, what would it be?
6. When was the last time you thought about leaving our team? What made you think about this?
7. What is most important to you about your work? In what ways does your current job contribute, or not contribute, to what is important to you about your work?
8. What is bothering you most right now about work?
9. If you left here, what would you miss?
10. What do you like the most about working on this team? Working in this organization?
11. What can I do that would be helpful to you?

Stay Interviews are an effective and inexpensive action that you can take now to build retention within your team. While time is often in short supply in a manager’s day, a stay interview is a much better use of a manager’s time than finding a replacement for a departure that could have been prevented.