Conducting STAY Interviews - Emerging Nurse Leader

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Begin with the end in mind. That was the advice of the late Dr. Stephen Covey in his work on the habits of highly successful people. It seems especially important today as we consider the challenges with nurse recruitment and retention. NSI Nursing Solutions is reporting that the national average turnover rate for RNs working at the bedside is 14.6% and that roughly 25% of hospitals have current vacancy rates of greater than 10%. Recent data from the 2018 AACN Healthy Work Environment survey indicates that more than 50% of the 8800 critical care nurses survey plan to leave their current position within 3 years. This turnover will come at a very high cost to organizations as the most current estimates of specialty nurse turnover exceed $50,000 per RN.

Retaining staff has never been more challenging so every new idea deserves consideration. The practice of STAY interviews is one that is gaining momentum according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Stay interviews are conducted to help managers understand why employees stay and what might cause them to leave. In an effective stay interview, managers ask standard, structured questions in a casual and conversational manner. The goal is to collect real-time information on what matters most to nurses and then individualize your retention strategies. Managers are encouraged to begin these interviews by letting staff know that they would like to have an informal talk them you to find out how the job is going in order to best support them. Five suggested questions to ask published in an article written by Richard Finnigan (for SHRM) include the following:

Question 1: What do you look forward to each day when you commute to work?

First, we ask a question that brings employees into the here and now, and asks them to focus on their daily duties and challenges rather than expand on broader issues like pay and benefits. Employees stay and engage based on their relationships with supervisors and colleagues and how much they like what they do—and these categories are far more important than pay and benefits. Effective probes include:

Give me an example
Tell me more about…
Who do you look forward to working with the most?

Question 2: What are you learning here, and what do you want to learn?

Next, we are inviting employees to tell us their desires regarding development and careers. Some are ambitious to advance, some curious to learn more, and others just want to work and go home. We train managers in client companies to focus these discussions and subsequent stay plans on skills, so probes may include:

Which other jobs here look attractive to you?
What skills do you think are required for those jobs?
What skills would you have to build to attain those jobs or some responsibilities of those jobs?

Question 3: Why do you stay here?

While appearing simple at first, the question of why employees want to stay with your organization opens major doors for discovery. Most employees have never pondered their answers, so the manager’s role is to stubbornly require one. A good next line is, “Take your time because I really want to know.” Employees then must announce to you, and more importantly to themselves, what they value most about their jobs. Possible probes include:

Tell me more about why that is so important to you.
Is that the only reason you stay or are there others?
If you narrowed your reasons to stay to just one, what would it be?

Question 4: When is the last time you thought about leaving us, and what prompted it?

Everyone thinks about leaving sometimes, so a directly-worded question brings a much-needed conversation into the light. When an employee last thought about leaving tells us the urgency, and what prompted it tells us why. Possible probes are many. Here are three:

Tell me more about how that happened. Who said what?
What’s the single best thing I can do to make that better for you?
How important is that to you now on a 1-10 scale?

Question 5: What can I do to make your job better for you?

While this question sends out a net for all remaining topics, it must ultimately yield answers about the interviewer. Avoiding defensiveness is critical, lest word spreads that the manager cannot take feedback and remaining stay interviews become short and fruitless exercises. Here are a few probes for consideration:

Do I tell you when you do something well?
Do I say and do things to help you do your job better?
What are three ways I can be a better manager for you?

These STAY interviews should be conducted periodically. In his work on the evidence on timing, Daniel Pink points out that many staff seriously consider leaving a position around their anniversary date with the organization. This makes sense as they ask themselves – do I still want to be here next year. Pink would advise that nurse managers pay attention to anniversary dates and do STAY interviews 60-90 days before that date. There are some nurse leaders who read this and probably think – great but I have no time. To you, I would respond that recruitment and onboarding are very time-consuming so consider STAY interviews a better investment of your time.

Read to Lead

Pink, D. H. (2018). When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. New York: Riverhead Books.

Read Rose Sherman’s new book available now – The Nurse Leader Coach: Become the Boss No One Wants to Leave