Everybody does exit interviews.
We do stay interviews.
Once a year. Intentionally.
A few years ago, we realized something that now feels obvious in hindsight. We were asking some of our most important questions far too late.
The people who can tell you the most about your culture are not the ones leaving. They are the ones who are still there. The ones choosing, every day, to stay.
So at PayNW, we stopped waiting for an exit to ask how things were going.
What came next was not a new program.
It was a shift in how we listened.
We want to understand what keeps people here. What actually motivates them to stay. Not what sounds good on a careers page, but what shows up in real life.
We ask about work-life balance, because flexibility can be incredibly supportive or quietly exhausting depending on how it is experienced.
We ask about connection. About managers. About teams. Because feeling isolated does not always look like disengagement right away.
We ask about communication and collaboration, knowing that things can feel crystal clear at the top and confusing everywhere else.
We ask about tools and resources, because friction often hides in places leaders stop seeing.
We ask about growth, because people rarely leave when they are learning and moving forward.
And then we ask the hardest question.
When was the last time you thought about leaving, and what prompted it?
Not hypothetically. Not someday. A real moment.
Most people do not leave without first having a moment where they wonder if they should. A hard week. A missed opportunity. A season where something felt off.
That question tells us what almost cost us someone we value.
There is another choice we made that I believe matters just as much.
Who asks the questions.
There are leaders who believe stay interviews should be conducted by the direct manager. I understand that perspective.
In our organization, we chose a different path.
Our stay interviews are delivered by a neutral party. Our HR manager. That choice was intentional.
When someone is talking to the person who directly influences their performance reviews, compensation, or advancement, honesty can get filtered. Even with the best intentions.
There is another layer to this that matters just as much.
Managers are human.
When feedback is delivered directly to someone who owns the day-to-day experience, it can be hard not to personalize it. Even constructive feedback can start to feel like a referendum on their leadership. That emotional filter can get in the way of truly hearing what is being said.
A neutral interviewer creates space on both sides.
It allows employees to speak freely. It removes the pressure to perform. And it gives us clearer, more honest insight into what is really happening.
If you do not have an internal HR leader, I would even recommend using an outside HR consultant. There is real power in people being able to share with someone who is not directly tied to their performance expectations.
Trust changes the conversation entirely.
But here is the part that matters most. And the part that gets missed.
The most important thing about a stay interview is not that you do it.
It is what you do after.
Asking these questions creates expectations. People are being honest because they believe it will lead to something.
If nothing happens, trust erodes faster than if you had never asked at all.
We learned quickly that stay interviews should only be deployed when you have the time and willingness to respond. To look for themes. To communicate what you heard. To explain what will change and what will not.
You do not have to fix everything.
But you do have to acknowledge what you learned and show people that their honesty mattered.
Listening without responding is not neutral. It is damaging.
These conversations do not work because of perfect wording.
But if you are looking for a place to start, here are the questions we use:
Exit interviews tell you why someone left.
Stay interviews tell you why they did not.
They give you a chance to listen while people still want to stay. And if you are willing to respond to what you hear, they become one of the most powerful tools you have for retention, trust, and culture.
That is the work.
Gratefully,