Listening to Employees

In continuation of my post on retention of employees, I got some queries on what to do when we conduct Stay Interviews…

While Exit Interviews have been a traditional tool for trying to understand the issues employees face, the general feeling is that almost always, it is too late. We have all heard of employees saying:

‘What is the point of these questions now?’

‘Why couldn’t these questions be asked earlier?’

and even worse !!

‘Why did the organization not do anything when I had raised this earlier?’

In a country like India where almost all organizations are grappling with the issue of retention of quality talent, these are interesting questions. They tell us that the employee is waiting to be heard. He is willing to give the organization a chance. However, if the issues faced by him are not sorted out, he will not hesitate to move on.

For this, we need to understand from the employees the key imperatives that help him stay in the organization. Stay Interviews can be used as a forum where we focus on the +ve, we focus on why employees would want to stick with the organization ‘in spite of’ the constraints he faces.

Stay Interviews can give us interesting insights into the employee mindset thereby assisting in 2 key elements of the HR loop.

i) Engagement

ii) Development

Engagement – Stay Interviews will give us interesting insights into how our key employees think, thereby, giving us an early warning mechanism for identifying employees likely to leave. Our engagement initiatives can then be centered on critical employees (who are likely to leave and whose skills are pivotal in the organization)

Development – Stay Interviews throw up a lot of areas where the organization needs to improve as well as employees coming up with areas where they would want to improve in order to move on to the next level in the organization.

However, a word of caution around Stay Interviews: While employees understand and admit that changes cannot be made overnight, if they do not see a sustained effort towards change, they will start thinking of the whole exercise as hogwash. Hence, one needs to be very careful and take care of employee expectations. Any organization should venture into this exercise only when there is a clear mandate and effort towards making a difference.