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Engagement + Culture, HR Insights April 26, 2022 0

How to Incorporate Stay Interviews into Your Performance Management and Employee Engagement Cycles

Stay interviews are a helpful HR strategy designed to increase employee retention. The interview assesses an employee’s happiness with the company, satisfaction with their role, and likelihood of being a flight risk.

So let’s talk about how to incorporate stay interviews into your performance management and employee engagement cycles, questions to ask, and best practices to maximize insights.

Benefits of Stay Interviews in the Performance Management and Engagement Cycle

Stay interviews are highly effective in showing your employees that you genuinely care about their happiness. They improve communication, encourage engagement, and enlighten you about what makes your employees tick.

Better yet, stay interviews also illuminate areas you need to improve to help you boost retention throughout the organization. Let’s look at some of the key benefits of stay interviews.

Retain your key talent

Losing employees during The Great Resignation is a concern, as is the highly competitive recruiting landscape. Incorporating stay interviews into your performance management cycle can help to mitigate attrition, reducing the number of key talent you lose and vacancies you’ll need to fill.

Promote engagement and teamwork

Stay interviews focus on sharing ideas. Management and employees want the same thing—for people to work together harmoniously and feel they have a future with the company. Stay interviews empower employees to have an active voice in setting processes for the company and engages them in better communication.

Inform enrichment opportunities

Given a chance to share openly, your employees will let you know what they’re interested in or feel they lack in training and education. In this sense, the stay interview may help you develop programs tailored to their interests or aptitudes.

Check in on your company culture

Stay interviews provide insight into the health and strength of your internal culture and how people are working together.

Identify problems early

Stay interviews focus on the positive, but issues may well arise that indicate areas of improvement. When stay interviews are conducted regularly, it helps HR identify potential problems early, allowing you to make policy changes before situations get out of hand.

Reduce the HR workload

Attracting, hiring, onboarding, and training are costly endeavors from just about every standpoint. The time and expense of doing so could be better spent on other tasks. Stay interviews help reduce the burden.

Reduce costs

Keeping employees is more economical than the alternative. Replacing a mid-level employee can cost upward of 150% of their annual salary, and productivity will suffer until the new hire is in place and up to speed.

How to Conduct Stay Interviews

Many companies wait to do their stay interviews when they have an inkling that an employee is thinking of leaving. However, there is no reason to wait until you sense unrest. There are many benefits to conducting regular stay interviews and incorporating them into your performance management and employee engagement cycle.

Here are a few best practices for conducting stay interviews.

1. Identify your top performers but don’t focus solely on them

Most organizations know who their key players are. By the same token, you don’t want to make other employees feel that they are less important. Stay interviews may reveal rising stars you hadn’t considered, so ensure you’re giving everyone the same opportunity to connect. Some organizations incorporate 3-4 ‘stay interview’ questions into their performance reviews to ensure all staff have a chance to share.

2. Make it personal

A stay interview needs to focus on the employee holistically, not just on their work. You want to know what drives them, what they’re passionate about, what they do outside of work, how they unwind, and what they look up to in terms of leadership. Even when taken from their personal experience, these aspects will tell you a lot about what they respond to in the working environment as well.

3. Meet with the employee one-on-one

A stay interview is much more effective when conducted one-on-one. It tends to increase anxiety when the employee meets with several people. One-on-one stay interviews are more personal and encourage the employee to relax and share openly. If trained, manager could incorporate stay interview questions during quarterly or annual review meetings to ensure the conversation is balanced, and employees have an outlet to express their needs.

4. Consider conducting the interview outside the work environment

To further reduce the nerve-factor during the interview, consider taking it outside. Lunch, coffee, or simply taking a walk outside are mood-changing, refreshing, and may help the employee feel more relaxed about sharing details.

5. Listen and understand

Listening is a vital aspect of a stay interview. You’re initiating a discussion with your employee, but you’re really looking for feedback, impressions, genuine emotions. To make it work, you need to listen—only then can you provide helpful feedback.

6. Solicit ideas and suggestions

Many employees will have ideas and insights on how the company can improve. Still, some will be hesitant to share that information directly for fear of retribution from their team leaders, colleagues, or you. Consider offering a way for them to submit anonymous feedback and let them know how to do it. Performance management software, like emPerform, allows you to create anonymous surveys that open the door for deeper insights beyond what’s said during the interview.

7. Be consistent

When stay interviews are conducted regularly as part of the performance management process, employees will know they have a forum in which they can be heard.

8. Follow up

Transparency and consistency are critical, so be sure to follow up on any insights gained. Look for trends in the responses collected of themes that would justify change. Your people need to know that you’re not just “going through the motions” and that they are heard. When action is taken, don’t wait for them to notice. Let them know that their input means something and contributes to the overall good of the culture and organization.

Best Practices for Stay Interviews

We’ve outlined many best stay interview practices in the tips above, but let’s summarize for brevity:

Listen first
Ask questions that address negatives and positives
Avoid questions that only require a yes or no answer
Do not dismiss an employee’s opinions, even if you personally disagree
Always follow up on changes you discussed in the interview
Schedule stay interviews regularly as part of your performance management program

Improving the Employee Lifecycle with Effective Performance Management

Employees are the most valuable asset a company has. With the current talent crisis reducing the pool of available workers and the exodus known as the Great Resignation, business growth is at risk. To ensure continuity, organizations must focus on retention and improving the employee lifecycle to accomplish their goals.

Performance management programs are critical to supporting this effort. The ultimate goal is to keep employees engaged and happy, which requires more than just a decent salary and benefits. We don’t always know why our best talent leaves, and we can’t prevent them all from moving on. Still, there are strategies and tools we can apply to improve the situation and create a more sustainable lifecycle for employees at any stage of their journey.

What is Employee Lifecycle Management?

Employee lifecycle management has six distinct stages. Each area can be exploited individually to ensure an employee’s time at the company is positive and fruitful. A holistic and thoughtful lifecycle process results in higher levels of employee satisfaction, increased productivity, and better retention.

Managing each of these stages requires clear goal-setting, repeatable processes, and systems for measuring success. A performance management program delivers on all points, ensuring consistency and continuity while providing the data you need to define success.

Here are the six steps for effective employee lifecycle management, along with insights and tips to guide you through each of them.

Outreach

Your employee brand, how you attract and communicate with potential candidates matter. The outreach stage is their initial engagement with your organization and will make a lasting impression. It’s your opportunity to build trust and establish the foundations of a mutually beneficial relationship.

Recruitment

A structured hiring process builds on the trust you’ve already formed with the candidate. Build repeatable processes and consider outcomes to see how you can enhance future efforts. Using software to track tasks and activities ensures nothing slips through the cracks, and it also helps you identify areas that need improvement.

Onboarding

The first 100 days on the job are easily the most critical—and the riskiest. It’s here where missteps are most likely to happen. By the end of this period, your new hire will know whether they want to stay at your company or not. Should they decide to go, it could cost the company up to three times the employee’s yearly salary.

To mitigate this potential, your onboarding program needs to provide them with all the tools they need to feel supported and set up for success. While many companies see onboarding as something that takes place in the first couple of weeks after the hire, extending the process to encompass the first 100 days or more ensures the support continues until the new hire is fully comfortable in their role.

Performance reviews (30-60-90 day reviews or new hire assessments), feedback, goal management, and surveys contribute to onboarding success as your hire, their managers, and your HR team will have the data they need to keep the process on track.

Development

Training is undoubtedly part of development. But when we talk about development in the employee lifecycle, it’s more about learning and advancement. Development should be more than just an afterthought—it ought to be a part of your employee lifecycle strategy. Your employees are looking for the next stage in their careers. If you can provide the vehicle that gets them there, rewards will follow.

Development improves retention, boosts employee engagement, and results in long-term benefits for the organization.

Goal management is a vital aspect of performance management and employee development. SMART goals align employee interests with company goals, so you’re effectively encouraging them to explore the possibilities while maintaining a clear path to achieving the results you want.

emPerform simplifies goal-setting, development planning, and career planning, ensuring your entire workforce is aligned to common objectives and that employees always have what they need to succeed.

Performance

Employee performance is highly indicative of engagement levels and happiness. But performance is more nuanced than simply tracking one’s ability to do a job. It’s about quality, efficiency, aptitude, attitude, and effectiveness. If you view your employees as an investment, tracking employee performance is about nurturing that investment.

If you ask the right questions and monitor the right metrics, you’ll see that investment grow and flourish. Every aspect of their engagement with your company has value and can be tracked.

Employee performance management software provides you with a centralized tool from which you can manage and track all facets of the employee lifecycle. It is fully configurable to your organizational needs, helping you track what matters most without additional complications.

6. Offboarding

Offboarding is the final stage in the employee lifecycle. It could come at the end of a long and productive career or as the employee transitions or moves into a new position at another company. These segues are as critical as the initial phases of engagement and should not be treated as a negative.

When employees leave, for whatever reason, you should use it as an opportunity to learn, grow, and improve. The insights you gain at this juncture could be massively valuable, even if the situation with the employee was not ideal.

When employees leave happy, they will continue to sing your praises. They may refer their friends and colleagues or potentially return to work for you again. Maintaining good relationships reduces the potential for reputational damage, lawsuits, and financial loss.

If you view your employee performance system as a cycle rather than a linear process, even closures will inform the way forward. In the effort to achieve continuity throughout the employee lifecycle, EmPerform delivers the data and insights you need to improve processes and enable better decision-making.

Performance Management Begins Before Day One

When employees have clear expectations from the start, they are more likely to give it their all and be 100% engaged in seeing things through. When they can visualize a path to success, receive regular feedback, are aligned with the company’s mission, and have a transparent rewards structure from day one, the benefits resonate throughout the organization.

Get started with emPerform today

Engagement + Culture, HR Insights November 22, 2021 0

Identifying & Retaining Top Talent During and After the ‘Great Resignation’

There is something noticeably alarming going on in the North American labor market. 2021 saw record streaks of employee turnover and walkouts, the highest on record according to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics.[1] This phenomenon is aptly named the ‘Great Resignation,’ and companies are keen to understand why this is happening and to avoid losing valuable talent.

Finding and hiring the best talent to ensure organizational continuity is still a focus for companies, but the focus on talent acquisition is now being shifted to retention. HR leaders and CEOs need to do everything possible to continually assess flight risks and develop immediate plans to identify and keep key employees.

Who is at risk of leaving?

Research firms like Visier Insights have used data to understand the recent trends and help companies assess their potential risk for turnover. It turns out that “tenured, experienced professionals, and more women than men show a dramatic increase in resignations compared to the pandemic-ridden year 2020.”[2] Couple that with the findings from Gallup showing that 48% of the working population in the United States is actively job searching, and there is no wonder companies are worried about the effects of a turnover tsunami.

What are the real costs of turnover?

Rising resignations are a concern on multiple fronts, in particular the direct costs to companies. According to Gallup, the cost of replacing an employee is very high – up to two times their salary or more, depending on the position.[3] And the costs don’t stop there. There are also the indirect costs of lost productivity and the effects of increased workloads and having to hire third parties to complete work. At the same time, there are administrative processing costs. There are also costs associated with the impact on motivation and culture from losing team members and the intangible costs of losing the institutional knowledge of key long-term staff when they exit.

Should companies panic?

Regular employee turnover and attrition are part of organizational lifecycles. Companies expect a certain number of routine exits and plan accordingly. What is concerning about these recent trends and leaving HR and leaders scrambling to find solutions is how to avoid unnecessary or avoidable turnover. So yes, companies should be worried and take the necessary steps to understand the underlying currents in their workforce.

Why are employees leaving?

Typically, a large number of employees cycling in and out of jobs is a signal of a healthy economy. But since 2020, when COVID-19 changed the landscape of life and work, companies must now look more closely at why employees are leaving. The Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) summarized its findings nicely by saying that employees are moving on from their existing companies and jobs due to pay/recognition, work-life balance, and workplace culture.[4]

Overall, SHRM and Visier Insights list the following as key reasons why employees are resigning:

Recognition: The desire for better compensation and recognition for work.
Burnout: Being asked to take on more work or work faster and a lack of work-life balance, especially among employees in a leadership position.
Workplace Culture: Overall employee experiences and issues that affect engagement and satisfaction.
Desire to Learn: Opportunities to learn new skillsand for more training opportunities.

Added to that is the rising prevalence of remote work, where employees are no longer restricted to applying for jobs in their direct geographical area or physically going into an office.

In short, employees want to feel recognized and appropriately rewarded. They want to know their company cares about and acts to better their personal and professional well-being. They want to align themselves with teams and companies who share their values, and the rise in remote work means they have more options for alternative employment. Depending on an employee’s immediate pain points or options, any of these drivers can send your best talent straight for the door.

What can companies and HR do to avoid unnecessary turnover?

Companies cannot address all aspects of turnover by next week; however, they can take specific immediate actions to get the ball rolling. But companies must understand why employees in their particular sector and organization are staying and leaving and make a plan tailored to that information.

Look for the outliers in performance, engagement, and potential data:

Instead of relying on average scores and ratings from performance reviews, engagement surveys, or pulse surveys, companies need to look at the outliers in their data. These folks will be the ones of interest and will highlight blind spots. For years, companies have looked at ‘good’ satisfaction rates and given themselves a pat on the back. But now, and with many tenured employees eyeing options, companies need to get very granular and assess the performance, potential, and engagement of specific employees and groups to identify the most valuable team members, understand their risk of leaving, and actively avoid it where possible.

Having a centralized system for job-skill reviews and performance measurements, pulse & engagement survey data, and career assessments can help companies track the real-time measures and health of talent. This information will allow them to identify high-potential (valuable) staff more easily and work to actively retain them.

Check-in with staff immediately & regularly:

It seems obvious that the easiest way to gauge if an employee is at risk of leaving is to ‘ask,’ but many managers and companies still struggle to make the time and forge the channels for effective employee conversations. Some managers are not equipped to conduct effective discussions or have the mandated time to do so, and many companies still struggle to launch and assess vital engagement and satisfaction surveys. In addition, companies who have done away with formal performance and skills ratings are now finding it challenging to quickly identify their top talent and plan for skill and succession gaps.

HR should use this time to collect as much employee data as possible from surveys, performance reviews, and personal one-on-one interactions with staff. These touchpoints can reveal insights that will help leaders understand what is working, what isn’t, and what can be changed to avoid losing employees unnecessarily. If employees are looking for more training and skills, be prepared to offer it. If employees find it challenging to manage their workloads, consider restructuring or investing in resources. If employees are demanding flexibility, consider unwinding legacy policies to see what can be accommodated, especially when it comes to remote work. If employees find they are not adequately compensated for their work, revisit your compensation structure. Your competitors are likely doing all of this.

Look at culture & rewards:

Companies cannot typically do anything about employees who have already left; however, they can ensure they don’t repeat any of the same mistakes with new employees. They can also work to ensure existing employees see the changes they are asking for. For example, revisit compensation and rewards structures and be prepared to align them with the market and what employees deserve. Recall, it costs double an employee’s salary to replace them, and it is much easier to keep an existing employee than it is to find a new one. Next, listen to what employees are saying about perceived culture and teams and empower managers to actively find solutions.

In terms of physical policies that can affect culture, COVID-19 forced many employees to get situated working from home, only to be called back with sometimes little transition or reason by companies. With many companies accepting hybrid or completely remote work options, the employees who gained an appreciation for working from home may consider a rigid in-office policy a reason to look for work elsewhere. Determine the perception of workspace and place and revisit your policies addressing underlying concerns that may render rigid policies unnecessary.

Most employees do not expect a perfect atmosphere but want their fundamental fiscal, physical, mental, and professional needs met. COVID-19 pushed companies and leaders to pivot and make unprecedented decisions about their teams and policies. The ones who acted with a purely business mindset without regard for employee well-being and satisfaction will have more work to do to remedy the cultural damages done, but it isn’t impossible. Culture cannot be transformed overnight, but it starts somewhere and usually acknowledges that it should be a priority.

Employees will continue to leave their jobs searching for greener pastures, and companies will continue to battle to attract and retain top talent, but COVID-19 has changed the nature of employee retention altogether. Companies that can easily identify their top talent and invest in actively developing and retaining them will see the greatest results. Also, HR teams who continue to push for effective performance, engagement, and development practices will help ensure this data is woven into corporate decision-making moving forward.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

[2] https://hello.visier.com/stop-the-exit-report.html

[3] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/351545/great-resignation-really-great-discontent.aspx

[4] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/summer2021/pages/reducing-turnover.aspx

Tag: great resignation