Creative Class

A friend (who does not work where I work) recently confided that a rival company to her employer has approached her with a job offer. This company has approached her at least once a year for the past five years and she always turned them down. But this time, she’s likely to accept the new position.

Why?

• Because in the current economy, the projects she has been working on will not be making much if any profit and therefore there are no bonuses she’d be walking away from this time.

• And, her current position has become boring to her - nothing much is going on so there are few opportunities to learn new skills or gain new experiences.

Her employer relies heavily on her experience and will be shocked when she gives notice.

To prevent departures of top talent such as the one described above, many companies are now doing “stay” interviews. Instead of waiting until a valued employee announces their departure - and doing an “Exit Interview” - companies are finding ways to survey existing staff to learn why they enjoy coming to work and what new opportunities people would like to have.

Last week, the Globe and Mail ran a good article on the subject, focusing on USA-based companies and consultants. Here are a couple excerpts:

A young tech company in San Francisco, Experience Project Inc., also uses stay interviews, particularly with newer hires who are possibly feeling a little shell-shocked by the start-up’s long hours and intense workload.

“I’m trying to unearth things that are working well for them, things that are getting them excited and jazzed up about the job,” says Julio Vasconcellos, the company’s vice-president of business development. “I want to know what makes them get up in the morning so they’ll keep coming to work.”

…

At Panamedia Group [of St. Louis], the formalized stay interviews paid off because the company takes the data and acts on some of the best ideas. For example, when some employees started saying they would like to work on a project geared to smaller events – instead of those that drew upward of 5,000 people, which was what the company focused on at the time – Panamedia gave the new initiative a green light.

“It came out of their desire to watch the company grow and have something cool to work on,” Mr. Slawin says.

Stay interviews here offer not just ideas for retention but new directions for the business as well.

As companies try to increase productivity and improve their ability to keep top people in the years to come, having formal discussions about why people stay - as well as why they leave - will likely become increasingly common.

If my friend’s employer were doing this, they might not be about to watch top talent walk to a competitor.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 8:03 am and is filed under Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.