run-stay-interview

Run Stay Interview

Conduct a structured, proactive conversation with a valued direct report to learn what keeps them engaged and what might drive them to leave — so you can act on that information before a resignation forces a reactive response.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Kaye & Jordan-Evans's "Love 'Em or Lose 'Em" is the most widely cited employee retention framework, used in training programs at Boeing, the US Army, and hundreds of large corporations; SHRM's 2016 guidance identifies stay interviews as the highest-ROI single retention intervention; Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Deloitte have formalized stay interviews as part of their talent management cadence Impact: Gallup's 2017 "State of the American Workplace" found that 52% of voluntarily exiting employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent their departure — and 51% say no one asked them in the 3 months before they quit what would keep them; SHRM research found that replacing an employee costs 50–200% of annual salary; Kaye's research found that stay interview participants who received follow-through on at least one issue showed 40% higher retention at 12 months compared to those who received no follow-through Why best: Exit interviews collect data after the organization has already lost — the employee has resigned, is mentally gone, and has no incentive to be fully candid; performance reviews are evaluative and backward-looking; one-on-ones are operational; stay interviews are the only tool designed specifically to surface what the employee values and what they might need, while there is still time to respond

Sources: Kaye & Jordan-Evans "Love 'Em or Lose 'Em" (Berrett-Koehler, 2014); SHRM "Stay Interviews: A Tool to Prevent Employee Turnover" (shrm.org, 2016); Gallup "State of the American Workplace" (2017)

Steps

1. Determine who to interview and when

Stay interviews are not for the whole team simultaneously. Prioritize:

High priority:

• High performers who are hard to replace
• Employees who have been approached by competitors
• Employees who have recently lost a peer they were close to
• Employees with 2–4 years of tenure (high flight-risk window)

Timing:

• Annual for all direct reports as a standard cadence
• Quarterly for employees showing early disengagement signals (declining participation, increased absences, lower energy)
• After a major organizational change (reorg, layoff, leadership change) that may shift what people value

Do NOT schedule as a response to a perceived flight risk signal that you haven't acknowledged — if the employee suspects you're interviewing them because you think they're about to leave, it changes the dynamic. Frame it as a standard practice applied to everyone.

2. Set the frame before the conversation

This is not a performance conversation, a check-in on their projects, or a career development conversation. Name it clearly when scheduling:

"I'd like to schedule a stay interview with you — a conversation 
specifically about what keeps you here and what I could do to make 
your experience better. It's not about performance, not about your 
projects. It's about you. About 30–45 minutes — does [time] work?"

Sending this in advance gives the employee time to reflect rather than reacting in the moment.

3. Ask the core stay interview questions

These five questions from Kaye & Jordan-Evans cover the full retention landscape:

1. What do you look forward to when you come to work each day? Surfaces what energizes them — their motivators, the work they love, the relationships that matter.

2. What are you learning here, and what do you want to learn? Surfaces whether mastery is being served — whether the role is growing them or stagnating.

3. Why do you stay? The most direct question. Forces articulation of what they value. Often reveals what they've never said aloud.

4. When was the last time you thought about leaving, and what prompted it? Most valuable question. Almost every high performer has considered leaving. This surfaces the real triggers — without requiring the employee to volunteer them unprompted.

5. What can I do, or stop doing, that would make your experience here better? Directly actionable. What they tell you here is your to-do list.

Listen more than you talk. Do not defend or explain. Take notes. If an answer is vague, probe: "Can you say more about that?" or "What would that look like specifically?"

4. Resist the urge to reassure or solve in the moment

The most common manager mistake: responding to a concern immediately with a reassurance or a counterargument. This closes the conversation and signals that the employee should be less honest.

Instead:

Employee: "I sometimes feel like my work isn't being seen at the leadership level."
Wrong: "Oh, I'm sure [executive] knows who you are."
Right: "Tell me more about what that feels like. What would visibility look like to you?"

Your role in this conversation is to understand, not to fix. You can fix later.

5. Follow through on at least one commitment — fast

Within one week of the conversation, act on at least one thing the employee told you. This is the single most important step. Stay interviews where nothing changes are worse than no stay interviews — they signal that asking was performative.

Even small actions matter:

• Connected them to a project they asked about
• Changed a meeting cadence they said was draining
• Advocated for them to present to a senior stakeholder
• Sent them one article on a skill they said they wanted to develop

Follow up explicitly: "I wanted to let you know I heard what you said about [X]. Here's what I did / am going to do."

6. Document what you learned — for patterns and for continuity

After each stay interview, document:

• What they said keeps them here
• What they said might drive them away
• Your follow-through commitment
• Any risks you identified (flight risk level, timeline, concerns)

This documentation protects you if they do leave — you can explain the actions you took — and it surfaces patterns across the team if multiple people raise the same issue.

Rules

• Ask before they decide to leave — the value of stay interviews decays to zero the moment someone has mentally resigned; they must be proactive, not reactive
• Listen without defending — if an employee says something that feels unfair, resist the urge to correct them; their experience is real even if your intent was different
• Follow through on at least one thing within one week — a stay interview with zero follow-through is the fastest way to signal that their input doesn't matter
• Keep it confidential — what is shared in a stay interview must not be forwarded upward without the employee's knowledge and consent; if you cannot keep it confidential, say so upfront

Common Mistakes

• Scheduling only after a flight-risk signal appears: by the time you notice the signal, the employee's emotional departure is often weeks old; annual proactive cadence prevents this.
• Turning it into a performance conversation: if you pivot to discussing their deliverables or growth gaps, you lose the trust that makes honest answers possible.
• Making promises you can't keep: "I'll get you visibility with the exec team" when you have no way to do that poisons the relationship; commit only to what is within your actual authority.
• Asking and doing nothing: 40% retention improvement from follow-through vs. no follow-through (Kaye research) is entirely driven by action; the conversation alone produces no retention effect.
• Skipping high performers because "they seem happy": happy people are not immune to better offers; those who have never been asked why they stay are the easiest to poach.

When NOT to Use

• As a reactive conversation after you discover they're interviewing elsewhere — once the employee has a competing offer, this is a counteroffer conversation, not a stay interview; the dynamic is entirely different.
• With an employee who is on a PIP or in a documented performance issue — the conversation conflates two different things; address the performance issue separately.