Stay interview questions a manager can actually ask

An exit interview is where the company finds out, in detail and too late, why someone left. A stay interview is the same conversation held while there is still something to do about it. HR writes about them as a programme. For a manager with eight reports it is simpler than that: it is one honest conversation a year with each person about why they are still here and what would change that.

I did not call it a stay interview the first time, and I would not recommend you do either. Say you want twenty minutes to talk about what is keeping them here and what would make them leave, and that nothing they say goes anywhere without them. Then ask.

Why they stay

• What do you look forward to here, honestly, on a normal week?
• What would you miss if you left tomorrow?
• What do we do that you have not seen other places do well?
• When did you last feel like your work mattered to someone?

Start here, not with the leaving questions. People find it easier to say what they would miss than what they hate, and the answers tell you what to protect. If someone says the on-call rotation is the thing they would miss, you now know what not to touch in the next reorg.

What would make them leave

• What would a recruiter have to say to get you to take the call?
• If you left in the next year, what would the reason most likely be?
• What has frustrated you more than once that you have stopped mentioning?
• Is there something you have been waiting on from me or from the company that has gone quiet?

The recruiter question is the best one on this list because it is hypothetical enough to answer. Nobody tells their manager I want to leave. Plenty of people will tell you that a recruiter would need to offer more design work, or a team that ships, or a manager who gives feedback, and those are things you can act on this quarter.

What would make staying better

• What is one thing that would make your week noticeably better if it changed?
• What would you like to be doing more of a year from now?
• What do you need from me that you have not asked for?
• If you were me, what would you change first?

What to do with the answers

Write them down the same day, in the person's own words, in the file you keep per person. Then do one visible thing within a month. Not everything. One. The point of the conversation is not the information, which you could have guessed half of. The point is that the person watches what happens afterwards, and that is what decides whether they believe the next conversation.

Three answers to take seriously even when they are said lightly: a frustration they have raised before, anything about their manager (which is you, and they will soften it), and any version of I have not thought about it. That last one, from someone who used to have opinions, is the earliest signal of leaving I know of.

The one rule

Do not run a stay interview if you are not prepared to act on what you hear or to say honestly why you cannot. Asking what would make someone stay and then changing nothing is worse than not asking, because it confirms the suspicion that brought the question up in the first place.

The signals that lead to this conversation show up in ordinary 1-1s months earlier, which is the case for writing those down. Why one on ones get awkward is about how that context goes missing, and the overload set in the free 1-1 question generator covers the weeks before a stay interview is needed.