Nikie Walker, Ed.D, with her practice team at Advantage Eye Care, a practice in Kentucky, where Dr. Walker was practice manager for over 12 years. Dr. Walker says that stay interviews can help you remain in touch with the feelings of employees, and sometimes stop problems before they even begin.
A way to ensure the employees you rely on stick with you.
By Nikie Walker, Ed.D
Oct. 11, 2023
How happy is your staff? If you recently experienced employee loss, you may have started to question if there has been a shift in the culture and atmosphere of your office. As you work toward replacing staff, you may worry that not only do you need to find the right people, but ensure those right people stick with your practice.
How can you keep in touch with your staff without them feeling you are micromanaging? There is a relatively new concept within the human resources field that will allow you or your office manager to stay in touch with staff and mitigate problems before they happen. It is called stay interviews.
As a practice manager for a mid-size optometric practice for over 12 years, stay interviews became a powerful tool for retaining our staff, and ensuring that they were engaged in their jobs.
What’s a Stay Interview?
“A stay interview is a structured discussion a leader conducts with an individual employee to learn specific actions the leader can take to strengthen the employee’s engagement and retention with the organization,” according to Richard Finnegan in The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention, Second Edition (Society for Human Resource Management, 2018).1
Generally, stay interviews are conducted quarterly or biannually. These one-on-one meetings with your staff can serve many purposes. It allows your staff to know that you are interested in what they have to offer the organization. You can also discover what is working and what is not working for the organization.
Many times, there are simultaneous issues between patients, computer servers, or staff issues where we are just trying to put out the hottest fire first. This can cause the needs of your staff to be pushed aside, especially for employees who do not say much. Stay interviews can help with the retention of staff, engagement and the overall satisfaction of your employees.
How Do You Do It?
What are some guidelines you should follow in a stay interview, and what questions generate the most conversation? Matthew W. Burr (2023) suggests the following:
- Make sure the leaders of the organization are on board with this new initiative
- Talk to your staff in-person
- Make sure to schedule enough time with each employee.
- Leave the employee’s performance out of the conversation. This is not a time for correction.
- Do not offer the questions in advance.
- Try not to get off-topic.
- Set expectations.2
What questions should you ask? An article from Indeed for employers suggests the following:
- What is the most exciting part of your job?
- What aspect of your job do you wish you could change?
- What factors contribute to you doing your best work?
- How could your work-life balance be improved?
- What additional resources or professional development opportunities would be useful to you?
- What situations have made you consider resigning?
- Are there talents you have that you do not get to use in your position?
- What could the company improve about employee recognition?
- Are there additional benefits you would like to see?3
Impact of an Effective Stay Interview
The average rate of turnover in healthcare can be as much as 25 percent. Replacing an entry-level employee can cost 30-40 percent of their annual salary.4
According to the University of Iowa, the stay interview will show your employees that you recognize and appreciate their loyalty, that you care about more than just performance, and, that you can be open to changes within the organization.5
All these aspects help to bring greater satisfaction to your employees in turn reducing employee turnover.
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What I Personally Learned By Conducting Stay Interviews
Our practice had an influx of turnover one year and we wanted to ensure that the new staff that we onboarded would stay long-term. As a quasi-experiment, we decided to try stay interviews with new and current staff.
Leadership and I were surprised by what we gleaned from these sessions. Although the staff was leery at first, they knew leadership was serious about what they had to say and that we were taking this new process seriously after we had the second round of interviews.
One statement that we prefaced and emphasized with the staff before we began the stay interviews was that “we may not take every suggestion that you make for improvements, but we will take what you say very seriously and with great consideration.”
During one session with an employee, we discovered that another employee was making inappropriate comments about race in the office. I was able to address this immediately with that employee. Had we not started the stay-interview process, it might have been days or weeks before this problem was brought to my attention. I was able to have a candid conversation with the employee about her comments and reassure the other employees that this issue had been resolved.
By listening to your employees through stay interviews, you can increase your revenue, productivity, morale and improve practice culture.
Additionally, stay interviews can improve processes and procedures in your organization such as onboarding, recruitment, hiring and learning and development.6
Finally, and perhaps more importantly, you will give your employees a voice in the organization. This will allow them the opportunity to feel not like an employee, but part of something bigger that they too want to see be successful and thriving.
References
- Finnegan, Richard (2018). The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention. Society for Human Resource Management.
- Burr, Matthew W. (2021). “Bringing Stay Interviews to Your Organization.” Society for Human Resource Management. Available at: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/pages/bringing-stay-interviews-to-your-organization.aspx
- “Conducting Stay Interviews to Improve Employee Retention.” Indeed for Employers. Available at: https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/conducting-stay-interviews
- Heinz, Kate (2023). “The True Costs of Employee Turnover.” Built In. Available at: https://builtin.com/recruiting/cost-of-turnover
- “Supervisor Training at Iowa.” The University of Iowa: University Human Resources (2020). Available at: https://hr.uiowa.edu/sites/hr.uiowa.edu/files/2020-02/stay-interviews-why-how_0.pdf
- Tucker, Elissa (2022). “Are Stay Interviews Effective?” APQC: American Productivity and Quality Center. Available at https://www.apqc.org/blog/are-stay-interviews-effective
Nikie Walker, Ed.D, is the founder and president of 20/20 Walker Consulting. To contact her: nwalkerconsulting2020@gmail.com
