CHAPTER ONE

Why Bother?

*  Why bother? What’s in it for you?

You’re busy, perhaps busier than you’ve ever been in your life. Why would you consider adding one more item to your overwhelming to-do list? Why take the time and make the effort to conduct stay interviews?

The answer is that you should conduct stay interviews because you want to:

1. better understand all of your employees. What makes them unique and special? What do they bring to the team? And what do they want more of … or less of?

2. demonstrate that you value them as human beings, that you care. This assumes, of course, you actually do care.

3. encourage them to stay on your team. It’s very expensive to lose them. You want them to stay, both physically and psychologically. You want them to love coming to work with you and for you. You want them to bring their creativity, energy, and effort with them.

The Cost of Loss

*  You’ve already seen the numbers. You know, the ones that tell you how much it costs when a talented employee walks out your door. It’s been well documented that it costs 70 percent to 400 percent of an employee’s annual salary to replace him or her. Some of those costs are easy to measure and are sometimes called “hard costs.” Think about one talented person you lost recently. What did it cost your organization to replace her? Did you:

•  recruit on job boards or run Internet ads?
• hire a headhunter?
•  pay a referral fee?
• cover candidates’ interview expenses, such as airlines, hotels, meals, or cabs?
• commit to a larger salary or give a sign-on bonus to the new recruit?
•  offer a moving allowance?

Soft Costs Are Costlier

* Then there are the harder-to-measure soft costs. These represent the more subtle effects and costs of talent lost. Which of these have you seen? And what did it really cost you and your organization?

You’ll lose time interviewing.

If you weren’t interviewing all those candidates for the job your terrific employee left, what would you be doing instead? You’d be building, selling, designing, leading, brainstorming, connecting, teaching … and more. We rest our case.

Productivity plummets during a job search.

You start losing money the moment your talented employees disengage. Instead of working for you, they’re updating their résumés, logging on to job boards and social media, responding to potential employers, interviewing, negotiating, accepting the new job—and then celebrating. Their departure is a pricey proposition.

When someone leaves, the work doesn’t.

Work doesn’t go away just because the person handling it leaves. It simply gets put on hold or redistributed until a replacement is found. And very often that replacement never materializes. The image of a hamster on a treadmill is all too accurate. The result is burnout and lower morale for all those who’ve stayed.

When one goes, others follow.

Talented people find greener grass and then call their buddies, enticing them to follow. This happens even more often today, particularly among younger workers, who highly value both flexibility and friendships.

They’ll take their brilliance and (perhaps) your customers with them.

Have you ever had a loyal customer follow you to your next job? What did that cost the organization you left? And what about the brilliance and the institutional knowledge that wanders out the door with that person you cannot afford to lose? Tally that.

No one enters fully ready.

How long does it take to teach new employees the ropes? How long before they know how to navigate your organization, talk to your customers, integrate with other business units, or move an idea? Meanwhile, the team carries the load … at what cost?

New hires don’t always measure up.

It’s a risk you take when you’re replacing a great employee. If the new hire isn’t as productive, personable, or knowledgeable as the one you lost, what is the cost?

Run the numbers

There’s only so much you can do without the people you need to get the job done. There’s only so far you can reach, only so many fires you can put out, and only so many projects you can take on. The next time you wonder whether stay interviews are worth your time and effort, run the numbers. Calculate both the hard and the soft costs of talent loss. Then call your employees in and find out what will keep them engaged and on your team. Do you wonder how to do that? Read on.