By posing these questions to your team members ( and , just as importantly , authentically reckoning with the answers ), you can better understand the level of psychological safety they experience at work . If responses indicate that employees don ’ t feel comfortable taking risks or making mistakes , Edmondson and Google offer leaders several suggestions : l Frame the work you ’ re doing as a learning problem , not an execution problem l Model curiosity and ask a lot of questions yourself l Acknowledge your own fallibility l Solicit input and opinions from the team frequently l Share information about personal and work style preferences , and encourage others to do the same The process of fostering psychological safety isn ’ t always easy , but it ’ s an essential part of creating the kind of work environment where other tactics — like stay interviews , for example — are likely to be far more impactful . Think about it : what good is an interview of any kind of the interviewee doesn ’ t feel psychologically safe enough to answer questions honestly ?
MAKE ‘ EM WANT TO STAY Once the psychological safety of your team is established , how , exactly , do you go about conducting a stay interview ? The process is actually pretty simple , and it starts with understanding what ’ s unique about a stay interview . As the name suggests , these interviews are conducted to help managers understand why employees stay with their companies and what might cause them to leave . Unlike performance reviews , the questions a manager asks in a stay interview are not designed to formally evaluate an employee ’ s effectiveness . Instead , the questions should serve as an opportunity to gather honest feedback from the employee about their relationship with their work and your business so that issues that might cause low engagement or even lead the employee to leave their job altogether can be addressed in a spirit of openness and collaboration .
A quick web search will yield plenty
of examples of stay interview questions that you can use or adapt to meet the specific needs of your spa or company , but the Society of Human Resource Management ( SHRM ) has a free list available that hits several of the topics that are helpful to cover during a stay interview , including : l What do you look forward to when you come to work each day ? l If you could change something about your job , what would that be ? l What would make your job more satisfying ? l How do you like to be recognized ? l What talents are not being used in your current role ? l What motivates ( or demotivates ) you ? l What can I do to best support you ? l What can I do more of or less of as your manager ? l What might tempt you to leave ?
This list is far from comprehensive , but it offers a clear indication of the kinds of subjects stay interviews are primarily concerned with . Whereas a performance review may implicitly put employees in a position to consider
36 PULSE ■ AUGUST 2021