Engagement and retention have been top concerns for companies over the past several years, and it looks like they’ll remain issues for some time to come. While some of the factors impacting the way people stay or go in their careers is out of your control, you actually have a lot more power in this area than you might think.

The truth is, your employees will almost always tell you what they need to stay engaged with their work –– or whether they’d honestly be better off somewhere else. You just have to ask the right way.

That’s where stay interviews come in.

You might have heard of these (or not, they’re shockingly underused), but it’s like an exit interview you do before someone actually decides to leave. In it, you set aside a couple of days or weeks to talk to each of your team members individually and ask them what keeps them at the company, what would make them decide to leave, what they’re missing from their work right now, and what they’re seeking for career growth and professional development.

Three benefits of conducting stay interviews:

-- You get the inside scoop on what’s going on with your team.

One of the hardest things about managing is having to make decisions without all the information. Doing stay interviews can open up a wealth of data that you might otherwise never have found out, letting you make well-informed decisions about how you run your team.

By learning exactly what your high performers want and need, you can give it to them or work with them to reach a compromise, which helps keep them engaged with the company. Similarly, you can find out what’s going on with your middle-of-the-road workers, and create a plan to better meet their needs and help them develop. And if you find that you have some lower-performing employees on your team, you can use these meetings to have a frank conversation with them and talk about what their needs are, whether you can meet them, or whether they’d be better off transitioning into another position or company.

Long story short? It’s a great way to retain the high performers, improve the middle performers, and move away from the low performers.

-- You can spot trends.

While you might talk about some of these things in passing in your weekly or monthly check-ins, the stay interview is specifically dedicated to this one topic, giving you and your staff time to really think this through. And since you do all your stay interviews in the same period of time, you can get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening with your team and spot trends. For instance, if everyone is saying they’re feeling constrained by a certain process, that’s an easy fix. Or if you find that multiple people are saying that one team member is holding them back, then you know you’ve got some coaching or even staffing changes to make. And along those lines...

-- You can make proactive staffing choices.

Sometimes someone’s going to leave, and that’s all there is to it. But unless someone’s a genuinely bad fit for your team, there’s almost always something you can do to encourage them to stay, if you catch them early enough in the disengagement process. Some managers are afraid to do stay interviews because the thought of finding out that your top performers are unhappy sounds terrifying, but believe me, it’s way worse to find out by them turning in their resignation. Doing regular stay interviews helps you keep your finger on the pulse of your team engagement, so you can be in a position to proactively intervene, or support people as they transition out.

It’s so simple, but such a powerful way to move the needle on engagement. So block out some time on your calendar for stay interviews –– we’re coming up on the end of year, which is a great time to do them.

And, if you’d like to learn how to do an effective stay interview, I’ve got a new on-demand training on just that. In it, I walk you through the step-by-step process I use to help my clients conduct stay interviews that get the information they need and help them retain top talent. Stay Interviews - How to engage and synergize your team (on-demand training).