How can you understand employees in a way that creates better retention and engagement? On this show James Pugh, Director at the Cedar Springs Public Library, talks about Retaining Employees Through Stay Interviews. It’s a way to help improve the workplace for staff so they will want to stay and help serve our communities.
Transcript
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Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast, where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
How can you understand employees in a way that creates better retention and engagement? On this show, James Pugh, Director of the Cedar Springs Public Library, talks about retaining employees through stay interviews. It’s a way to help improve the workplace for staff so that they will want to stay and help serve our communities. Enjoy the show!
James, welcome to the show.
James Pugh:
Thanks for having me.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Thanks for being here. Today we are talking about retaining employees through stay interviews. First, will you explain why retention and engagement are essential concerns for libraries? 01:23
James Pugh:
Well, yeah, that is a great question. First of all, I think employee retention and engagement are essential for any business or organization, including libraries. When you have staff that want to show up and work every day and are excited to be there, then everyone has a much better experience from the coworkers to the leadership, to the patrons. Keeping employees as long as you can and keeping morale up seems to be like the ideal for each workplace. But unfortunately that seems to be really difficult right now. Look at what’s happening in libraries—we are getting inundated with intellectual freedom challenges.
We’re experiencing professional burnout at a higher rate than other professional fields. I think there’s something like fifty-two percent of public workers, which includes librarians, planned on voluntarily leaving their jobs, and that was in 2022. So, I can only imagine it might be looking a little bit worse now. You’re getting these skilled professionals leaving the field. I think that employee retention is a major issue that everybody needs to be addressing.
On top of all that, managers today are faced with new complications in the workforce, like a new demand for schedule flexibility and remote work. We had to deal with the great resignation and quiet quitting, which are still kind of a thing, and the varying needs of—I think there’s five generations in the workforce right now, and each one has their own needs. How do you navigate that? How do you figure out what the Gen Z worker wants compared to the Baby Boomer? If somebody ends up leaving your library, picture the strain that puts on your employees who absorb their job duties while you’re trying to find that replacement—what that does to staff morale, what that does to the budget, because onboarding a new employee can get kind of pricey.
Leadership, I think, needs every tool that we can to help keep workplace morale up, to keep our best performers as long as we can. All while juggling this new work scape. And I think this is where stay interviews, or at least elements of them, could be really beneficial for libraries.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: Those are important reasons to do this work. Stay interviews can help with all the issues you’re talking about. Could you define stay interviews and how they differ from other one-on-one meetings? 03:56
James Pugh:
Stay interviews are very similar to one-on-ones, in that they are designed to be a structured discussion between leadership and employees, but where they differ is the nature of the discussion. A stay interview is a great way for the leader to understand what it is their employee needs to be engaged at work. They are designed to be more candid, less formal, more discussion-based, less interview-based. They’re designed to help build a trust between the leader and the employee. The interviews offer a chance to really get to know your employee and what makes them tick professionally. You get to find out their why, then you can come up with the what and the how later. You can find out what motivates your employee, what they like about their job, what they don’t like about their job. That’s a big one, and what you can do to help cultivate their career, not only at your organization, but moving forward.
That’s not to say that there isn’t some structure to the stay interview. There are five recommended questions that the book asks you to do. They are—what do you look forward to each day when you commute to work? What are you learning here? What do you want to learn? Why do you stay here? That’s a big one. When was the last time you thought about leaving us and what prompted it? That’s sometimes a tough answer to hear. Then finally, what can I do to make your job better for you? That’s the most important question. Because again, this gets to the why of your employee. That last question lets you decide the what and the how. This is why my employees like to come to work. What can I do as an employer to help them, and how can I achieve that?
The traditional one-on-ones go about that the opposite way. What can I do? How do you like your job? And then why don’t you like your job? They kind of got it backwards. The biggest part of the stay interview, though, is where the managers must be held accountable. They must actually address the topics and the issues raised by the employees. Part of building that trust is the manager taking action. Data shows three-quarters, or something like that, of employees report that they are more effective at their jobs when they feel like they are listened to. And, ninety percent of workers are more likely to stay if an employer puts their feedback into action. So, and I think that’s what stay interviews are doing. You’re getting their feedback, but you have to put that into action. Once they see that, not only are you being accountable to your employee, but they take on the responsibility to you as their employer, and it really will, naturally—the retention and the engagement just happens because trust is built, and because you’re able to find out why your employee is there and how and what you can do as a manager to keep them.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: Where did the concept of stay interviews originate, and how does it differ in libraries? 07:00
James Pugh:
Well, I don’t know when the concept originated, but it gained popularity around 2012 with Richard P. Finnegan’s book, I mentioned this earlier, The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention. I think they’re on the second edition right now because that’s the copy I have. I don’t know if there’s a newer one, but the concept of stay interviews have really only been around for about a decade. If you read the book, Finnegan designs the stay interviews to disrupt that one-size-fits-all solution that a lot of major corporations implement for employee engagement.
So instead of treating the symptom with a pizza party, you get the cure to the disease by actually listening and acting on your employees’ needs. The genius of the stay interview is that they are tailored to the individual, so you can get a much more holistic solution to issues in your library. The only thing that is different, I would say, is in the book—Finnegan again suggests that the stay interviews be their own separate meeting and they be held regularly. But we all work in libraries. We know how impossible that can be. You’ve got different organizational sizes, you’ve got different budget sizes, you’ve got different roles and responsibilities. You’ve got the employers who have their own roles and responsibilities that vary from organization to organization. So why not take elements of the stay interview and just implement them in existing meetings. Replace your one-on-ones with stay interviews. So your initial one-on-one will be the stay interview. Then each supplemental one-on-one you’ll both address what was discussed at the initial stay interview—what progress you’re making on goals, where you are, what you’re doing as a manager, what they’re doing as an employee. Make it more of a discussion. Make it make them feel like they’re on their journey professionally with you. Make stay interviews a part of the onboarding process.
For me, when I started at my new role as the Director of the Cedar Springs Public Library, I conducted interviews with my staff to get to know them and immediately began building their trust. I also asked a professional recruiter about stay interviews, and he said to incorporate the five questions into the initial employment interview, which could also be a way to find out if this candidate will be a good fit for your library’s workplace culture—right off the bat.
With these new issues facing the workplace and managers, it’s imperative to establish that trust early and to show your employees that you value them and that you want them to stay. So, you have to hold yourself accountable by taking action early, and that will build that trust at light speed. If you incorporate elements of the stay interview in what you’re doing already as a manager, you’ll get much more successful as opposed to just doing them separately, like he suggests in the book.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: What type of trainings do managers need to implement stay interviews successfully, and how do the interviews work? 09:58
James Pugh:
Excellent question. There are stay interview training sessions that you can do online, and there are webinars as well, but there is a cost to those. If you’re only going to be implementing elements of the stay interview into what you already are doing, it’s really more practicing your conversational skills, honing your active listening, showing empathy, being aware of your body language, and being genuinely interested in the conversation. I guess, read How to Win Friends and Influence people. [laughter] No, sorry. I’m kidding.
What makes a stay interview so unique is that informalness of them, that candidness of them. It’s really just sitting down and talking to your employee as a person first and employee second—getting to that why, building that trust with them. It’s creating that safe space for them to want to come to you and be honest about their work and why they keep showing up every day, or especially why they’re frustrated with their job.
I would just suggest honing your skills on encouraging conversation. You know, encourage the discussion instead of just one-word answers. For example, if you ask, What are you learning here, and what do you want to learn? And your employee says, Nothing. You can encourage the conversation by saying, Well, I didn’t know that some libraries did blank, so I would love to learn how that works. What about you? Or something along those lines. Encourage the discussion by answering the stay interview question yourself with your own experiences. Humor. Be as sincere as possible, things like that. But, this is more of a subtle science than an exact art. So, the best way to do it is to just practice, practice, practice.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: How is the information utilized once a stay interview is completed? 11:46
James Pugh:
This is where the rubber really hits the road, so to speak—is where the manager shows accountability to their employee. You got to take what they said in the interview—what they were talking about, and you have to show them that they were heard and that you were working on it.
One of the underlying benefits of stay interviews is that employees hear directly from their supervisor that they care, and they want them to stay and grow with the organization. Supervisors take on that responsibility of retention and engagement. Again, once the employee sees that they’re more likely to accept responsibility for staying, they see you are putting in an effort, so they put forth an effort. It’s like the give-and-take.
When I was doing stay interviews with my staff when I was new, I discovered many employees wanted to learn more about the different roles and responsibilities in the library. So, I set them up with some online training courses that the state provides. The next step for me is going to be some job shadowing so that they can follow coworkers around and see what they do on a day-to-day basis—maybe learn a new skill like book mending, or cataloging, or something like that. We’re a small enough staff where we can get away with that.
I learned one staff member was interested in attending more conferences. We don’t have a big budget because we’re a really small library, but I do know about a stipend program that the state of Michigan offers to library workers for the purpose of attending professional conferences. I showed that employee how to apply for it so that they could attend a conference in the springtime.
A lot of staff were concerned with poor patron behavior. So, I’m in the process of updating policies. This is actually a good opportunity to explain to employees the library’s processes, because it’s been a few months and I’m still trying to get these policies into writing. They still need board approval. So, by explaining the delay to the employees, like This is how the policy process actually works and how arduous it can be. Even though I haven’t really addressed the issue, they still see me actively working towards addressing the issue and that is that trust. They still see me working towards that. What they asked me to work towards, and there’s that trust that we built. Even though I only addressed some of the issues staff brought up in their interviews, they still see me trying my best to address them. I think that it’s seen and appreciated and that they will hopefully want to stick around and do their best work for me.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: And as you said, they stay—primarily. And if they don’t, you know you’ve done everything possible. What are the results of successful stay interviews? 14:31
James Pugh:
They stay. No, [laughter] but seriously, in my opinion, it’s the trust built between employee and manager. I think that is the most beneficial result from a stay interview. Sometimes the intangibles are more important than the data and unfortunately the success matrix will vary from employee to employee due to how individualized the stay interview can be.
Additionally, there are some times that you absolutely cannot keep that employee logistically, because they’ve either got a new job, or they’re progressing in their career. You can’t accommodate them anymore as an organization. They’re moving. Sometimes they have to move on. I think the most successful stay interview will result in a trust that I keep mentioning. I keep saying you hold yourself accountable as a manager and your employees will see that and that accountability and they will appreciate it. Even if there are issues concerning employees beyond the manager’s control, it’s your opportunity to explain the situation or to be honest with them about it—or also support them in another way. I’m going to go back to the employee that wants to attend that professional conference as an example. There’s no room in the budget, like I said, because I showed them how to possibly pay for it through a different means with the stipend that’s offered by the state. Even if they don’t get the stipend, they still saw me showing my investment in their professional development, and I held myself accountable to that investment by following through and addressing the issue that they brought up in the stay interview.
I, as the director, am lucky enough. I can also try to find ways to make room in the budget for them to attend next year. There are multiple solutions, but I wouldn’t have known how to find them unless I had that conversation with my employee. It’s amazing how successful teams can be in the workplace when you all trust each other. You trust your employees, your employees trust you, coworkers trust each other. I think we can all think of a time where we’ve experienced that—how it felt to be seen, how it felt to be heard, what it actually feels like, when you feel like you’re contributing to the team or the project. Successful stay interviews will result in leadership and employees finding that feeling, finding that trust. The results will vary, but I think if you establish that trust, you will be repaid in dividends.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: Is there anything else you’d like to share? 17:10
James Pugh:
I do have a podcast. It’s a library podcast. It’s called We Blame Our Shelves. It’s me and a former coworker colleague. We love doing stuff like that. But for the topic, it is tough out there right now and I am excited by what is happening in libraries right now, even though on a national level it looks like it sucks. But when you look at the micro level—at your community level, there’s a lot of positives that are happening, especially with libraries and leadership roles.
I think this podcast is a great way for library leaders to share their ideas, to help the profession strive to be better, and to attract the best and brightest who want to help their communities in the ways that libraries can. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this tool and these ideas to help complete the puzzle for library employment and engagement. But to managers: remember to focus on what you can control, which I think stay interviews can help wrangle. There’s a lot that is thrown at you as a manager, and stay interviews can at least help you manage your employees. Also take care of yourselves. Even though things look bleak at the national level right now, focus on the positive impact your library has on your community, and take that time off.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: Great advice and thank you so much for sharing about your podcast, James, as well as being on mine to provide this valuable information with our listeners. James, do you have any favorite leadership books or resources, and why? 18:33
James Pugh:
I keep a copy of The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention by Richard P. Finnegan in my office for reference. I also really enjoy everything Brené Brown, namely Dare to Lead. I also like two books by Liz Wiseman, Rookie Smarts, which is a book encouraging leadership to take a learning approach instead of a knowing approach, and Impact Players, which is about how every team member can get into a new mindset and become a top contributor.
Those are just great leadership books, and they’re not focused on libraries, which I think is another thing some library leadership can look to—look to the private sector for some really good, innovative ways to lead your new team.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: In closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 19:31
James Pugh:
I love this question because I love what libraries stand for, and I love the services they offer their communities. I am passionate and excited about libraries and what they are offering nowadays—like the Library of Things, all the digital content—oh, a free third space that is desperately needed today. I would love to help libraries, especially library leadership, be the best that they can be for their staff, their patrons, and their communities. I again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this idea of stay interviews with library leaders across the nation. It’s not the absolute, end-all solution. It’s just a piece of the puzzle. So, let’s make libraries better for our staff so we can make them better for our communities.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
That’s fantastic James. Making libraries better for staff so we can make them better for our communities. It’s a good approach for all of us to take. I’m happy you shared this piece of the puzzle in making that happen through stay interviews. Thank you for being on the show.
James Pugh:
Thanks again for having me.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right into your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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