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We all know the dearth of good staff lately and so it’s more important than ever to retain those excellent team members that you currently have.
Many Fortune 100 companies have abandoned performance reviews (we by and large have as well) and instituted The Stay Interview. Find out more here – The Stay Interview: A Manager’s Guide to Keeping the Best and Brightest (Amazon)
Retaining staff is becoming especially important as we employ more Millennials as part of our team as they are the generation that is the one most likely to ‘up and leave’ for almost no reason.
The Stay Interview helps us understand them better – and also helps us to understand our non-Millennial employees better as well – enabling us to develop strategies better suited to retaining all of our highly-valued employees.
As an example, here are four important characteristics of the Millennials:
1. They work for their managers and want to like their managers.
2. They want to be trained as well.
3. They want to work for a company that cares about them and the community.
4. They want – no DEMAND a good level of pay – as they understand their value. But it is not and never will be the salary that will keep them in one particular job!
Stay Interviews will help to drive your engagement scores up and lead to greater staff retention.
Introducing Stay Interviews was one of many changes we instituted in many practices about two years ago following low engagement survey results.
The Stay Interview is nothing fancy. It consists of 5 basic and simple questions. (You might want to read the book to get the full and in-depth detail – see the link above)
It is amazing what you can learn by listening to the responses to these simple questions.
Think about implementing The Stay Interview in your veterinary business. Actually, on second thoughts – don’t THINK – just DO IT!
If you have any questions for Diederik regarding The StayInterview, ask them in the Comments section below
On graduation I purchased a Veterinary clinic in Maitland, NSW and sold it in July 2009. At the time of purchase, it was a run down one person clinic with about a 90% mixed and 10% small animal component. The business grew well, so that at one stage there were 4 branches and 8 Veterinarians. At the time of sale there were 5 Veterinarians, 16 support staff functioning out of a purpose built ‘A’ class Hospital with one branch. In 2004 the practice won the Pfizer/AVA Practice of Excellence Award as well as coming 3rd in the Fujitsu Customer Service Awards. At this stage (and even slightly before), I started co-presenting at trainings and workshops and in 2007 I started developing and hosting my own workshops. In July 2009 I sold my practice so as to be able to concentrate fully on my coaching, training, speaking and workshop business – and to be able to move to Exeter (NSW) to be with my partner. I missed clinical practice, so in May 2018 I purchased a veterinary practice with the aim of building it up by providing a highly customer service friendly veterinary practice alternative to the local community. In 12m...
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Last-minute Facebook posts and panic locum searches aren’t a staffing strategy, they’re a symptom of a system that needs to change. Let’s start with the facts - we’ve all done it. Posted a FB message that went something like: “URGENT – Looking for Locum tomorrow”...
