Employee survey

Stay interview questions for your team

Understand your team’s level of job satisfaction, and what’s keeping them engaged and committed to your company.

This image is a screenshot of Officevibe's Stay interview employee survey template. It shows the template's title which is "Stay interview survey", and shows 3 questions comprised in the survey template.

Why are stay interviews important?

Stay interviews are an important part of understanding the satisfaction and commitment levels on your team. They help you uncover what really drives your team’s engagement, and what common pain points your team members are facing. With this knowledge, you can get ahead of turnover, and improve your team’s retention.

How to start a stay interview

Before you launch into one-on-one stay interviews with each member of your team, sending out a team stay interview or ‘stay survey’ helps you get some higher-level insights. You can collect feedback and measure sentiments of your team as a whole, to spot common drivers of job satisfaction and any common demotivators. This will give you some good base knowledge to structure your individual stay interviews and go into them feeling prepared.

Additionally, this type of survey gives employees the chance to share some of their feedback anonymously. Questions about what keeps them in their job and what might sway them to leave can be sensitive for employees to answer. Having the option for anonymity creates safety for people to tell you how they really feel. Getting these honest insights will lead to better, more honest conversations when you do have one-on-one stay interviews.

When should stay interviews be conducted?

Ideally, you want to send a specific stay interview survey to your team every 3-6 months. Using a custom survey gives you fast, real-time insights into how your team is currently feeling, and lets you dig deeper into specific topics around job satisfaction and employee commitment. This is a great way to complement your Pulse Survey results, which help you track engagement over time.

It’s great to send stay surveys out on a regular basis, but you also want to conduct them during specific organizational or team events, such as:

Your company is experiencing high turnover.
There’s a big change in the business direction or strategy.
There’s a major event in your industry and talent is in high demand.
Employee engagement scores are low on your team.
A colleague has recently left your team.

These are key moments when you want to get a sense of how connected your team is feeling to their work, and what their common motivators and concerns are.

Stay interview questions for managers

Here are a few stay interview questions from the team survey template:

When you get ready for work, what are things you look forward to?
If you could change one thing about your team, the department, and the organization, what would those things be?
What could tempt you to leave our organization, and why?
On a scale from 0-10, how often have you thought about leaving our organization in the last 3 months?
What’s your advice on how we can improve as a team and organization?

What to do with answers to stay interview questions

The most important part of collecting insights from employees is acting on them. Follow these steps to follow up on the feedback you get from your team:

Respond to the feedback you receive to let employees know they’ve been heard, and thank them for their honesty.
Dig deeper when employees express dissatisfaction to really understand it, and how you might improve their employee experience.
Look for common themes among the answers you get from your team members, and share these high-level insights with your team.
Discuss what’s bringing down job satisfaction on your team and how you might improve these areas together.
Meet individually with every team member to understand their individual experience and create action plans as needed.