Stay Interviews: A Missing Facet of Employee Retention Strategy

Abstract

In the knowledge driven economies, the workforce is sighted as the live stream of organizations and the war for talent is intensive across job markets. The alarming attrition levels, especially in the industries like IT, has been merely challenging the company’s resource managing ability to come out with effective retention strategies that endure beyond the obvious of trends and assessments of employee turnover ratio at organizations. Organizations are keen to know those factors that can keep an employee engaged and committed creating a win-win situation. For long time companies with the hindsight approach, have been focusing on knowing why employees leave the organization rather to stress on knowing about what keeps an employee to stay with them. So considerably, the approach of “Stay interviews” helps the organization in gathering these hard facts and provides them to stay proactive with issues of employee turnover and retention. With the objective to uncover reasons and understand factors that appeal to employees to continue their stay with an organization; this article, studies across the factors of job satisfaction, management policies, career advancement, working conditions, pay benefits, rewards, recognition, job security, use of skills, work group cooperation, training and development, family and personal issues. This study includes the factor whether the employee looked for any job change during the past six months. Nevertheless, infant attrition, where an employee wants to leave in a short period say some six months of joining is not considered. It is quiet apparent that employee-employer relationships matter a lot to “score” with employee groups above the mere efforts of considering skills and technical competencies. This paper comes out with some interesting findings on why employees haven’t sought new employment opportunities and consequently helping companies to understand its strengths, as an employer. Nevertheless, further, companies can also know, equip and work on the mentioned areas of concern from the employees; thus affecting retention and turnover rates significantly .