11 stay interview questions for managers

A stay interview is a conversation between a manager and an employee who is not leaving, covering what keeps them at the company, what frustrates them, and what could eventually make them consider going elsewhere. The premise is sound. Ask people while they are still here instead of learning the answer during their notice period.

The questions are worth asking, but the meeting is not worth creating.

Richard Finnegan's The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention, Second Edition, published by SHRM in 2018, provides one of the clearest versions of the traditional model. Finnegan recommends telling teams in advance that individual stay interviews will be scheduled and keeping them separate from performance-appraisal meetings so the discussion can focus entirely on what leaders can do to retain and engage employees. SHRM's excerpt of Finnegan's framework lays out that approach directly.

Finnegan's model also contains the reason I disagree with the format. His later guidance acknowledges that employees have an initial emotional reaction to being invited to a stay interview and that the reaction is influenced by how much they trust their manager. That guidance is important because the employee's reaction becomes part of the conversation before the first question is asked.

I agree with keeping retention questions away from an evaluative performance discussion. An employee wondering how their manager is rating them is in a bad setting to explain what they need from that manager. The better alternative is to put stay interview questions inside the management rhythm that should already exist, primarily regular 1-on-1s, then use quarterly conversations to revisit what came up and what changed.

The 11 stay interview questions at a glance

For a manager who just needs the list, these are the 11 questions I would use.

Current fit

What part of your role feels underused right now?
What are you spending time on that you think nobody needs?
What would you want more of if we could shift your work by 20 percent?
What is slowing you down that I could remove?

Direction

Where do you want to be in two years?
What would you need to learn between now and then?
Does anything about where the company is heading feel unclear to you?
Is there a next step for you here that you can see clearly?

What the company owes them

What do you need from me that you are not getting?
What would you change about how we work?
What is one thing we could fix in the next month that would make your job better?

I would not work through all 11 in one sitting. Ask one or two when they fit the conversation, rotate through them over a quarter, and come back to the answers that require action.

Questions about current fit

What part of your role feels underused right now?
What are you spending time on that you think nobody needs?
What would you want more of if we could shift your work by 20 percent?
What is slowing you down that I could remove?

The underutilization question is one managers miss. People rarely volunteer that they are capable of more because saying so can sound like criticism of the work they were given. Asking directly permits them to talk about skills, interests, or capacity that the current role is not using.

The unnecessary-work question approaches the role from the other direction. Employees usually have the clearest view of work that produces little value because they are the ones doing it. A report nobody reads, an approval left over from an old process, a duplicate meeting, or a tool that turns a ten-minute task into an hour can be obvious from inside the job and nearly invisible from outside it.

The 20 percent constraint keeps the answer useful. "What would you rather be doing?" can turn into a conversation about an entirely different job. Asking what someone would change about a portion of their current role gives the manager something they may be able to move.

Questions about direction

Where do you want to be in two years?
What would you need to learn between now and then?
Does anything about where the company is heading feel unclear to you?
Is there a next step for you here that you can see clearly?

I prefer two years to five, especially on a small or growing team. Five years is long enough for the company, the job, and the employee's priorities to look completely different. Two years gives you direction while staying close enough to turn the answer into a development conversation.

A company does not need to promise the future role someone describes. It can still identify the skills, responsibilities, projects, or exposure that would help the employee move in that direction.

I would also ask directly whether the employee can see a next step inside the company. If a path exists and the employee cannot see it, the company has a communication problem. If no path exists, the manager needs to have a different and more honest conversation.

Company direction belongs here too. Someone can like the work and their manager while being uncertain about where the business is going or what that direction means for them. Retention does not happen inside a job description alone.

Questions about what the company owes them

What do you need from me that you are not getting?
What would you change about how we work?
What is one thing we could fix in the next month that would make your job better?

The first question only works if the manager is prepared to hear an answer about themselves. The employee may need clearer context, faster decisions, less interference, more feedback, greater autonomy, or something the manager does not particularly enjoy hearing. Employees need a place to say it, even when the eventual answer is no.

The one-month question creates a useful constraint. Asking someone to redesign the company can produce a wish list nobody has the authority, budget, or time to deliver. Asking what would improve the job within a month forces both sides toward something specific enough to evaluate.

Asking does not create an obligation to say yes. It creates an obligation to respond.

What if the answer is more money?

Compensation belongs in this conversation. If an employee says pay, bonus structure, or equity is the thing they would change, do not treat it as an inconvenient answer and redirect them toward something easier to solve.

Clarify what they mean first. Are they concerned about market competitiveness, internal equity, increased responsibilities, a missed promotion, or simply the amount they earn? Those are different problems, and a manager cannot respond intelligently until they know which conversation they are having.

The manager also does not need to negotiate compensation on the spot. If the decision sits elsewhere, say that clearly and give the employee a specific next step and timeline. "I cannot change your salary in this meeting, but I can review where you sit against the range and come back to you by next Friday" is a response. "I'll see what I can do" followed by silence is not.

If compensation is the reason someone might leave, knowing that is part of the purpose of asking.

Why I would not schedule a stay interview

The framing is the first problem.

Finnegan recommends telling teams in advance that managers will schedule individual stay interviews to learn what they can do to help employees stay longer and feel more engaged. His stay interview guidance makes the announcement part of the process.

Put "stay interview" on someone's calendar and the employee already knows retention is the subject. Why am I getting this meeting? Does my manager think I am leaving? Did everyone get one? Has somebody else left? Is something changing?

The advance framing changes the starting point before the employee has said retention is a problem.

The cadence is also wrong for the content. Frustration about being underused does not wait for a twice-yearly retention calendar. Neither does unclear career direction, unnecessary work, poor communication, or a manager relationship that has started deteriorating. A problem that begins in January should not need a June meeting before somebody asks about it.

Management capacity creates another problem. A manager already has recurring 1-on-1s, team meetings, project conversations, performance discussions, and some form of quarterly or annual review. Adding another ceremony does not create more management time. It creates another meeting competing for it.

The better answer is to improve the conversations already happening.

Put stay interview questions inside the 1-on-1

A regular 1-on-1 already has room for the employee's work, development, obstacles, feedback, and relationship with their manager. Most stay interview questions belong there.

That recommendation only works if the 1-on-1 is not just another project meeting.

A lot of manager 1-on-1s become status updates by default. The employee walks through what they finished, what is late, and what they plan to do next. Forty-five minutes later, both people know more about the project and almost nothing more about the employee.

Move routine status reporting somewhere else when you can. A project board, written update, team meeting, or async check-in can handle most of it. Protect part of the 1-on-1 for workload, development, friction, feedback, career direction, and the relationship between the two people.

Then the stay questions fit naturally.

A workload conversation can include, "What are you spending time on that you think nobody needs?" A discussion about a new project can lead into, "What would you want more of if we could shift some of your work?" A career conversation is already an appropriate place to ask, "Is there a next step for you here that you can see clearly?"

You do not need an interview script. You need the manager to ask a useful question and stay with the answer long enough to understand it.

Rotate through the questions over a quarter. The purpose is to create enough room in the normal manager relationship that an employee can raise something important when it becomes true, rather than waiting for a retention meeting.

Then use the quarterly conversation to connect what happened.

Let's say an employee mentions in February that client reporting is consuming most of Tuesday and keeping them from higher-value work. The manager changes the reporting process in March. During the quarterly review, the manager can say, "You mentioned the client reporting work was eating your Tuesdays. We changed the process last month. Has that helped?"

The follow-up demonstrates something more useful than concern about retention. It demonstrates memory and action.

Every quarterly review can function partly as a stay interview without being announced as one.

What managers do with the answers is more important

Feedback creates a debt. Once you ask someone what is making their job harder, what they need from you, or what they would change, you need to come back with an answer.

The manager's answer can be no. A request may not fit the budget. A promotion may not exist. The process somebody hates may exist for a regulatory reason they did not know about. Closing the loop means explaining what happened to the request instead of letting it disappear.

Unanswered feedback teaches employees whether speaking up is worth the effort. The same dynamic sits behind employees stopping speaking up at work. When employees repeatedly raise something and see no response, silence becomes a rational choice.

I would also record what changed rather than documenting every sentence someone said. A note like "wants more client strategy work, moving one account next month, revisit in Q4" is enough. The record exists so the manager can come back to February without expecting memory to carry the entire relationship.

Manager notes become useful across people too. One employee describing a process as the thing slowing them down is a conversation about that person's work. Three employees independently describing the same process is an operational finding.

Repeated unresolved requests deserve even more attention. If the same concern comes back quarter after quarter, the company no longer has an information problem.

The employee has already told you.

What if the employee is already looking?

Sometimes the retention conversation arrives after retention has become an immediate issue.

If an employee tells you they are actively interviewing or have already decided to leave, start by finding out whether the decision is still open. "Is there something that could realistically change your decision?" is a more useful question than immediately asking what the company can offer.

If the decision is still open, understand the problem before reaching for a solution. Compensation may solve a compensation problem. It will not repair a manager relationship, create a career path that does not exist, or remove a workload problem the company has no intention of changing.

A reflexive counteroffer can also delay a departure without resolving the reason the employee wanted to leave. Fix the underlying issue if it can be fixed. If it cannot, be clear about that.

If the employee has already made the decision, the manager's job changes. Thank them for telling you, do not punish the candor, and use what they have said to understand whether the same conditions exist for anyone else.

The point of these conversations is not to keep every employee forever. It is to make sure people do not have to resign before the company starts listening.

Where stay interview questions stop working

None of this covers the case where the manager is the problem.

An employee whose frustration is primarily with their manager is being asked by the source of the problem to describe the problem. The manager does not have to be intentionally intimidating for the power relationship to affect what gets said.

Managers have an outsized effect on employee experience, which is why the manager relationship deserves its own feedback channel. The broader relationship between management and engagement is covered in How Leadership Affects Employee Engagement.

The 1-on-1 cannot be the only place a company listens.

An anonymous employee engagement survey gives employees another route to describe their experience without the manager sitting across from them. Quokka Hub uses this anonymity model specifically for engagement surveys. Custom surveys, onboarding surveys, and offboarding surveys are separate survey types and are not anonymous by default.

For engagement surveys, written responses are de-identified before leadership sees them, and a human reviews the output before it reaches the results layer. Removing a name is not enough if the language itself can identify the person who wrote it.

Anonymity and confidentiality are also not the same promise, and employees notice which one they were actually given. Anonymous vs confidential employee surveys covers where each model applies and what you can honestly tell a team.

Small teams create another problem. A comment from an eight-person company may contain no identifying language and still become traceable if leadership can filter results down to a department of two people, a specific tenure band, or another narrow group.

Quokka Hub limits the ability to slice anonymous engagement results into groups small enough to expose individual respondents. You lose some analytical granularity, but anonymity is not useful if the reporting tools can reconstruct the identity the survey was designed to protect.

The manager conversation and anonymous engagement survey also answer different questions. The 1-on-1 tells you what an individual is willing to say directly to their manager. The survey tells you what the team says when individual attribution is removed.

Where those two sources disagree is useful information.

If 1-on-1s suggest everything is fine while anonymous engagement feedback shows leadership communication or trust deteriorating, leadership should want to understand why the two pictures are different. If a survey identifies a broad problem and individual conversations explain the workflows creating it, each channel has done a different part of the job.

The same two-channel approach sits behind Culture OS. Survey results should make the next manager conversation better instead of stopping at a dashboard.

What about exit interviews?

Run them. Just do not build your feedback system around them.

A stay conversation happens while the employee is still there and the company still has an opportunity to respond. An exit interview happens after the decision has been made. You can learn from it, but you cannot use the information to retain the employee sitting in front of you.

There is also little incentive for an exiting employee to provide a complete diagnosis of the organization. Some people will be candid. Others will give the shortest defensible version, finish the process, and move on.

I still prefer a short written exit survey alongside any live conversation. Writing gives the employee time to think without requiring every answer to be formulated across a table in their final week. Keep it short enough that completing it does not become another administrative task on the way out.

There is one question I would always ask:

How many months before you resigned did you first seriously start thinking about leaving?

The answer gives you a timeline. If someone says four months, go back four months. What was happening in their role? What did their 1-on-1s look like? Had they raised the same issue more than once? Did engagement data change? Was something sitting unresolved?

The question helps you understand how long the conditions existed before the resignation made them visible. People leave for reasons a company cannot and should not control, so every departure is not evidence that management failed.

Everything useful you learn from an exit interview should make you better at hearing the next employee while they are still there.

Frequently asked questions about stay interviews

What is a stay interview?

A stay interview is a structured conversation with a current employee about what keeps them at the company, what could improve their experience, and what could eventually cause them to leave.

The traditional model uses a dedicated manager-employee meeting. I would distribute the same questions across regular 1-on-1s and use quarterly conversations to revisit what employees raised and what changed.

What questions should you ask in a stay interview?

Good stay interview questions cover three areas: the employee's current fit, their future direction, and what they need from their manager or company.

Useful questions include what part of their role feels underused, what work they think nobody needs, whether they can see a next step at the company, what they need to learn, and what they need from their manager that they are not receiving.

How many stay interview questions should you ask?

You do not need to ask the entire set in a single conversation. Inside a regular 1-on-1, one or two relevant questions give the employee enough room to answer properly and give the manager enough room to follow up.

Rotate through different areas over the quarter and revisit the answers that require action.

How frequently should managers conduct stay interviews?

I would make retention-related questions part of regular 1-on-1s throughout the year instead of scheduling a separate recurring stay interview. Quarterly conversations can then be used to review what employees raised, what changed, and what remains unresolved.

This cadence gives managers information while there is still time to act on it.

Who should conduct a stay interview?

The direct manager is best positioned to act on questions about workload, development, communication, priorities, and the employee's day-to-day experience. Finnegan's stay interview model also places the manager in that role rather than HR.

When the manager is part of the problem, the employee needs another route to speak. That may be HR, a skip-level leader, or an appropriately designed anonymous feedback channel.

What is the difference between a stay interview and a 1-on-1?

A stay interview focuses specifically on what keeps an employee at the company, what affects their engagement, and what could eventually make them leave. A 1-on-1 is broader and covers current work, obstacles, development, feedback, priorities, and the manager-employee relationship.

The broader scope of a 1-on-1 gives managers a natural place to ask stay interview questions when they become relevant.

What is the difference between a stay interview and an exit interview?

A stay interview takes place while the employee is still at the company and there is time to respond to what they say. An exit interview happens after the employee has decided to leave.

Both can produce useful information. Only the stay conversation happens while retaining that employee is still possible.

What should a manager do if an employee says they are looking for another job?

Ask whether the employee's decision is still open and what would realistically need to change for them to stay. Understand the underlying issue before discussing a counteroffer or making commitments.

If the decision has already been made, protect the employee's candor, learn what you can from the situation, and determine whether the same issue affects other people on the team.

What should a manager do if an employee asks for more money during a stay conversation?

Clarify the compensation concern before responding. The issue may involve market pay, internal equity, expanded responsibilities, promotion, bonus design, or total compensation.

Managers should avoid making promises they cannot approve. Explain what can be reviewed, who needs to be involved, and when the employee should expect a response.

Do stay interviews work for small teams?

The questions are particularly useful on small teams because one employee represents a larger share of the organization and problems can affect the working environment quickly.

Small teams also amplify the limitations. The manager may be the founder, there may be no HR function or skip-level leader, and anonymous feedback becomes easier to identify when reporting is too granular. Small teams need direct manager conversations and a separate feedback channel that employees can use without attribution.

11 stay interview questions for managers, and why the meeting should not exist