Keeping employees happy is key when seeking to retain scientists, researchers and engineers in the aerospace and defence fields. SRC, a
research and development firm that serves the defence and intelligence communities, has had some success in the retention field. It made
Fortune magazine’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work For list in 2011, and its 14 regional offices are often in the Top 10 in similar rankings in their respective states.

Kit McDonald, the firm’s director of human resources (HR), likens the process to a marriage, where both partners have to work at keeping each other interested. “We have to make sure we’re remaining attractive to our employees because on any given day an employee is going to have their head turned by something else that’s going on at a different organisation and that’s what we really want to prevent,” she says.

To that end, the company has recently instituted “stay interviews”, its twist on the exit interview. Exit interviews, normally conducted by
HR personnel, are useful post-mortems. SRC conducts them and uses that data too, but they come too late, says Ms McDonald. Instead, SRC asks employees in annual stay interviews why they choose to remain with the organisation, asking them, for example, to name their top three reasons. Other questions include, “What would be the one thing that would make you go home tonight and update your resume?” The resulting data are aggregated, with recommendations provided to the firm’s executive leadership.

Very few companies have done “stay interviews”, and there is not a lot of data on their impact, but SRC has spent some time benchmarking
and perfecting the questions they want to ask. One conclusion is that the interviews should not be done by HR, an employee’s immediate supervisor, or a third party from outside the company. The interviewer should be the next highest supervisor beyond their immediate supervisor.

Quite simply, the interviewees want to know that their chain of command knows them and understands what they care about and what they want to see improved and changed. “They want to make sure that the information gets to the right person and that it’s falling on the right ear,” says Ms McDonald. Also, they may not feel comfortable sharing negative feedback with their immediate supervisor.

These stay interviews are targeted at the top 20% of the company’s employees—those who are the most vital talent with the highest potential in the organisation, she says. “We really believe that if we structure our culture, our compensation and our benefits to make those
high-potential top performers happy, then you will make those other 80% happy.”