Exit Interviews Are Too Late: Alabama Department of Public Health Uses Stay Interviews to Keep Top Talent
Success StoriesLosing a high-performing employee is costly. Recruiting and onboarding a replacement can take months, and the expertise and institutional knowledge that walks out the door isn’t easily replaced. For public health departments already stretched thin, turnover isn’t just an HR problem. It’s a public health problem.
Reducing turnover is the idea behind the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH)’s “stay interviews.” Rather than waiting for an exit interview after an employee has already made plans to depart, Workforce Development Director Ken Harrison explains how ADPH is taking a proactive approach: sitting down with valued staff to understand what keeps them engaged, what might push them away, and what the department can do to retain them.
Through the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG), ADPH requested technical assistance to help build out a stay interview protocol. They received support from a PHIG National Partner, who supported them throughout the process and connected them with another department working on stay interviews: the Louisiana Department of Health. This helped both departments avoid duplicative efforts. As a result, ADPH developed its own 13-question stay interview toolkit and built out a structured, integrated process that will help ADPH keep their employees engaged and retain top talent.
The response from staff and program leaders has been exceptional, which is good news for Alabama communities. As Harrison explains, ADPH must retain skilled employees to fulfill its mission to promote, protect, and improve the health of the people of Alabama.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How have you used PHIG funding?
Currently at the Alabama Department of Public Health, we use exit interviews, and we get a lot of great information out of those. But at that point, the employee has already left the department, and it’s more reactive in nature.
But with the stay interview, one thing that really intrigued us was that it was very proactive. It would help us understand why an employee would want to stay with the department, why they might want to leave, and also what the department can do to create opportunities to retain an employee.
Our PHIG evaluator and myself, we met and developed a timeline. We also submitted a technical assistance (TA) request through the PHIVE technical assistance portal, and we were assigned a national partner. We got a lot of great ideas from the Louisiana Health Department and our national partner as a great starting point. As a result, we developed our own stay interview toolkit, which included 13 questions we developed.
What’s the process for conducting a stay interview?
The staff we’re looking for is somebody who is in good standing — employees, obviously, that we want to keep. So we’re looking for an employee who has been with the department for two years, who, on their last performance appraisal, was rated a “Meets Standards” or above, with no disciplinary issues. Somebody who would be invested in the department.
We’ve conducted our pilot test, and our pilot group consisted of three people from our Health Media and Communications group. What the process looks like is: we sent the questionnaires to the staff prior to the interview. That way, the staff members have a chance to review the stay interview toolkit questions and they can put a lot more thought into their responses. Then, our interview team meets with them, and we conduct the interviews. After that, the interview team debriefs, and we group their responses into themes. Then, our PHIG evaluator meets with the supervisor, and they review those themes and talk about expectations moving forward. Then the supervisor meets with the staff member, and they work together to develop a “stay plan.”
What is a stay plan?
With the performance appraisal — and that’s what we use at ADPH — you’re talking about work performance, where all employees have responsibilities and result statements that we’re held accountable for throughout the year. Those are basically our job duties. But our stay plans are really where we identify different needs that an employee might have outside of their job duties. We develop a plan, we develop a solution, and we also have benchmarks that we can set for employees to accomplish whatever the stay plan might be.
How have staff responded?
The response we’ve had has just been exceptional. We have multiple programs that really want us to conduct stay interviews with them. We have a stay interview team that conducts all the interviews, because we want to make sure that we have consistency in the way the questions are asked, that the employee feels a little more at ease when responding to somebody who might not be their supervisor, and that it also takes the burden off the supervisor. We have multiple programs that are asking us to reach out to them and conduct the stay interview toolkit with their employees.
Why is this work so important?
It all goes back down to the community. If we have good employees and we’re retaining those employees, then they’re doing exactly what our mission statement calls for: to promote, protect, and improve the health of the people of Alabama. If we are retaining employees, we don’t have those gaps in knowledge that you might experience with turnover. And the employees that we’re retaining are the ones that are going to serve the people of Alabama the best.