Personal Development Project - Report #5 - The Stay Interview

Part of the Certified Public Manager program involves the completion of a personal development project.  My selected project is to prepare a series of lectures to my fellow managers about basic managerial concepts.  These series of posts are intended to document my progress in that endeavor.  This report pertains to a presentation made on 4/21/14.

Stay Interview Questions

For this week's lecture on key management concepts I addressed the concept of the "Stay Interview".

Historically, exit interviews have gained acceptance as a valuable source of feedback on workplace conditions.  Unfortunately, an exit interview may be too late to find out this type of information, particularly if it is a valuable employee leaving.

For the presentation I handed out a series of questions that had been provided to me by Mrs. Jane Wood in conjunction with the Washington State Supervision Essentials class.  (I have yet to express my thanks to Mrs. Wood for the excellent class yet on the blog, and I really should correct that oversight.  Thank You, Mrs. Wood)

Some of the concepts that I tried to highlight was that it is important to be asking our employees about their motivations instead of making assumptions.

I did wonder while giving the presentation how many of our employees the managers would actually want to stay.

Conversely my assumptions about the employees run along the lines of, they are working at jobs for which their security is tied more to their family connections than their performance, they have positions that accommodate their fishing and fireworks endeavors, and they work close to their families.  So why would they want to leave.

With the reformulation of my capstone project, I anticipate this will be a worthwhile and interesting tool that I can draw upon.  More on that later.

As an aside, we did touch on the frustration of providing performance appraisals that was addressed in the March human resources course.  That they tend to be only a tool for building a case for discipline, that they are difficult to base on objectively measurable items, in most cases are not particularly effective, and therefore they tend to be endured rather than utilized.


The stay interview questions handed out were:

• Why have you stayed working us as long as you have? Reason(s)?
• What do you like best about your job? Least?
• What are specific reasons that could cause you to leave us?
• Do you think your current position fully utilizes your talents?
• What have you learned since working here?
• Do you have anything new you would like to learn this year?
• Is there anything you’d like to change about your job? Team? Department?
• Have you ever considered leaving? What caused it? Has it been resolved?
• What is your dream job? How can we support your progress toward it?
• Do you feel supported in your career goals?
• Do you feel we recognize you? If not, what kind of recognition would be meaningful for you?
• What is one thing that would make your job more satisfying and rewarding?
• What part of your role is most challenging? What is least challenging?
• Do you feel you are best suited for your position or do you feel better suited for a different one?
• What can I do to help you stay longer?