Page 63 - Retaining Top Employees

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Envisioning Your Retention Strategy 51

The Most Important
Online Surveys
Interview: Why Are You There are a number of
Staying? excellent Web-based online
survey tools—such as
Amazingly, the single best
www.zoomerang.com and
method of acquiring quali-
www.supersurvey.com—that enable
ty information about the
you to construct your interviews
retention of key performers online (and anonymously,if you so
isn’t used at all by most desire). Many of the online survey
organizations. As we’ve companies provide templates that you
already seen, many organ- can use as a starting point for building
izations undertake exten- your own survey. Go to your search
sive exit interviews. Some engine of choice and key in “online
survey software” to find out about
organizations also conduct
the offerings available currently.
entry interviews, giving a
baseline for interpreting the
exit interview data. This provides good quality information
about why employees leave.
However, very few organizations ever take time to conduct
the interview that will provide the most timely information about
why their top performers are leaving or will leave—the “Why are
you staying?” interview.
Exit interviews are post-mortems: they’re conducted after
the loss. Even if the information they produce is of high quality,
acting on that information is a bit like locking the barn door
after a horse has bolted. As a result, many of the retention
strategies built on exit interview data are remedial—and they
feel that way to the employees. Often, by the time a retention
strategy based on exit interviews is put in place, the prevailing
attitude among the remaining employees is “Sorry—too little,
too late.” Morale may already be so bad that a retention strate-
gy meets with apathy at best and resentment at the extreme.
“Why are you staying?” interviews, on the other hand, are
proactive rather than reactive. They enable you to anticipate
those issues that could lead to a problem among your key
retention groups.