The average employee exit costs 33% of their annual salary.

Companies are now facing huge issues trying to retain their staff for a variety of reasons such as The Great Resignation, post Covid disruption and employees now prioritizing a better work-life balance.

Retention and turnover are two sides of the same coin. You can’t fix retention without first uncovering the reasons for the turnover. Due to the high cost of turnover, executives and HR are making both retention and turnover an equal priority.

Many organizations try to improve retention from an engagement angle. The approach is to increase engagement in order to improve retention, however, this approach doesn’t consider the whole problem. Engagement surveys often hide the volatility of the employee experience and the reason why individual employees leave.

Despite there being many programs, surveys and software vendors that promote their products for engagement, exit and retention solutions, in reality there has been little progress in how these convert to genuine successful strategies.

“The number of HR professionals citing retention/turnover as a top workforce management challenge is increasing, and it is now the second highest recruiting priority.” (2020 Recruiter Nation Survey, Jobvite, 2020).

Research Partners have developed a suite of retention services focused around stay interviews. Our services provide our clients with tools that give managers the ability to anticipate, learn and solve employee concerns before employees exit the business.

Stay interviews are an effective way of uncovering potential retention issues to understand why employees stay and what might trigger them to leave. They are a structured discussion held with an individual employee to determine what makes them stay or potentially leave an organisation. Feedback from these conversations can be used to develop targeted actions to strengthen the employee’s engagement and retention with the organization.

Keeping an open dialogue with individuals provides more comprehensive insight into the data gathered and allows you to reinforce that retention is about people.