Don't be fooled by internal surveys and exit interviews… they don't work.
With the economy improving, hiring is picking up across the profession; the ceasefire in the War For Talent is over. What can you do to protect your firm? For starters, firms should stop building retention programs around anonymous internal employee satisfaction surveys and exit interviews, says Dick Finnegan, founder of C-Suite Analytics and noted retention expert. Finnegan, the author of Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad , as well as The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention , shares with Consulting what firms should be doing to retain their most valuable employees.
Consulting: What's wrong with how most firms keep tabs on their employees' job satisfaction?
Finnegan: Imagine that just one of your customers comprised 30 percent of your revenue. Would you be content to use anonymous surveys as your sole means to seek feedback from that customer? This unlikely scenario underscores the extreme differences between the ways many firms treat their most-valued customers versus their best employees. We take customers to lunch to hear their feedback in warm, individualized settings. Most feedback from employees, though, comes via anonymous surveys, either from engagement surveys while with us or exit surveys when they leave.
Consulting: Why have firms traditionally used this approach if it doesn't generate helpful information?
Finnegan: Perhaps the underlying difference in our choice of approach is that we are confident we can meet any customer's requests because customers are reasonable. But with employees, we fear they will ask for more money, a prized assignment, or some other hard thing to deliver. So no news is good news… until they quit.
Consulting: So what should consulting firms be doing differently?
Finnegan: Experience tells us that high-performers usually respond very positively to being asked about conditions that will cause them to stay. They have realistic expectations, are pleased—or, at least satisfied—when just some of their requests are met, and they are mostly just glad to be asked. This technique is called "Stay Interviews." We find that once managers learn the skills, accept the right questions to ask, and probe for in-depth responses, they then become empowered to develop "stay plans" with their top performers that soon after lead to increased revenues for the firm.
Consulting: Who should conduct stay interviews?
Finnegan: Stay Interviews are supreme manager tools for retention and for engagement. They are manager tools because they are a critical link to retention whether that manager is you or someone who reports to you—or is even multiple levels below you. Abundant research from Gallup, Saratoga Institute, and other respected institutions tells us managers are the dominant force on employees' decisions to stay or leave. Consider as just one example: a study explored employees' perceptions of their pay, benefits, learning, development, and advancement. The outcome was that employees' opinions on all were strongly influenced by their opinions of their managers. In other words, if I feel good about my manager I feel good about my pay, benefits, and other things.
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