Implementing a Stay Interview Program in Your Fire Department

The past three years saw an upheaval in traditional workplace attitudes and practices. The fire service is no different. From the Great Resignation to quiet quitting, no department is immune to staffing crunches, mental health issues and turnover.

Fire departments, and government overall, have seen a dwindling number of applicants. Those who are hired often leave, which can cost departments upward of $70,000 to fill each vacancy. Furthermore, morale continues to sink, as generational divides and expectations drive wedges between new employees and management.

Perhaps your department invested in employee assistance programs, pay raises, wellness incentives and/or expanded leave opportunities. Why, then, would employees continue to leave or remain dissatisfied?

Ask yourself how much communication happens up and down the hierarchy. Too often, I observed officers who utterly failed to build relationships with their firefighters. This includes company officers to the fire chief. Therein lies one of the most intractable and complicated issues with the retention discussion. How do we cross generational norms to build professional working relationships? Simultaneously, how do we keep the tenured employees in times of change?

One solution that’s gaining popularity is the stay interview. Whereas traditional exit interviews probe employees’ thoughts upon their departure, a stay interview engages a current employee. Informal and periodic, these discussions allow management to extract what Stacey Cunningham of Aegis Performance Solutions calls buried treasure out of their ranks. Richard Finnegan, who is a human resources scholar, has observed a 20 percent reduction in turnover, all without spending a penny.

Younger generations

Millennials and Gen Zs have been labeled the “why” generations. They unceasingly, often to the point of madness (I can say this, because I am one), ask why every order is to be carried out. Conflict is inevitable, as continual questioning is at odds with traditional bureaucratic authority.

However, this thinking has tremendous potential when utilized constructively. Millennial employees have deep insight into what’s effective and what’s superfluous. They also want to share those insights. When was the last time that you sat down with a 20-something and asked for that individual’s input? If these members don’t understand the reasoning behind decisions or believe that they don't have any say, good luck getting them to champion your initiatives.

Millennials desperately want to support a cause. They intertwine their public and private lives.

Mission and vision statements often are seen as mere jargon.

Many senior members express hesitation around interactions with younger people because of a perceived or, often, legitimate fear of offending them. Silence is the result. There are no relationships, no sense of community.

Senior members

On the flip side, high-performing senior employees offer a wealth of organizational and technical knowledge that’s waiting to be tapped. Many of them, frustrated with the current state of affairs, are counting down the days.

Losing productive senior members is the death knell for the fire service. You simply can’t replace a firefighter who has 20-plus years on the job. Of course, there are exceptions, but senior firefighters are your best instructors and protectors. They know when a roof isn’t safe, when conditions are deteriorating and when someone isn’t coping well with a difficult run. The value that they provide to the organization is priceless.

Adversarial relationships add no value. Both groups have value to offer, have different solutions to the same problem and/or find different problems that are worth fixing. They both want to be heard. You must work with both of them. Optimally, you must harmonize the two.

Communication skills

COVID brought about remote work and schooling. In the blink of an eye, we lost the ability to communicate as a society.

Without seeing each other face to face, we can’t decipher body language, inflection or other nonverbal cues that encompass communication. Stay interviews provide a formal process to relearn the diminishing art of face-to-face communication.

Think of your most memorable boss or leader. My elementary school principal still stands out. In a school of more than 700 students, he knew every student, teacher and parent by their first name. Years later, I saw him at a high school football game, and he still remembered both my father’s name and mine. I have no doubt that he’d remember me today. The fact that my elementary school was the best performing school in the county was of no surprise to anyone. That principal was doing stay interviews long before we attributed academic lingo.

That said, many of us lost the art of communication. Just like we must train to fight fires, we must constantly exercise our communication skills. After years of Zoom meetings, we can’t expect to jump into easy and flowing conversations (although some extroverts might disagree). Stay interviews provide a framework to build relationships, increase communication and extract valuable information.

The process

Stay interviews are conversations that occur between supervisors/upper management andemployees. “Skip levels” are a variation, where an interview is held between an employee and their boss’ boss. Alternatively, in smaller organizations, the chief executive is the one who conducts stay interviews.

Interviews should be conducted annually at the most, although there’s potential in scheduling them according to a strategic planning process. This entails that every employee is interviewed once in the 3–5-year planning cycle.

Information that’s gleaned during this process is particularly useful when crafting strategic outlooks. Be sure to communicate to your interviewers what information is sought and repositories for storage.

Stay interviews are relatively informal. They should never be tied to annual performance evaluations. Try to get out of the office to meet employees in a common area, park or local coffee shop.

Ask such questions as, “Why do you stay?” “Why did you leave previous jobs?” “What can we do better or differently to support your role?”

Determining questions ahead of time gives you ideas for where to steer the conversation during awkward pauses.

Most importantly, be sure to restate employees’ answers back to them in your own words. You want to be sure that you understand their attitudes and opinions. With active listening, you show your employees that their contributions are vital while you solidify the information in your own head. This disciplined and focused approach lays the foundation for enduring relationships.

Before it’s too late

If the thought of interviewing every employee is too daunting, reach out to high-performers initially.

Ask department heads and division or battalion chiefs to submit names of individuals who they believe are high-performers.

Generally, you can figure out who these individuals are rather easily. Price’s Law holds that roughly 50 percent of the work is done by the square root of the total number of employees. This is confirmed over various industries. Building relationships with the individuals who are the backbone of an organization is imperative to continued success.

One organization that I worked with wanted to capture and build relationships with new employees. We were able to design a program by which supervisors held stay interviews at 30, 60 and 90 days into members’ employment. The organization combined this with a program to interview high-performers to boost their communication. All of this was recommended without requesting a single purchase. There is no more cost-effective tool to reduce turnover than communication that’s generated via a stay interview.

Often, the answers to our problems are where we least want to look. Exit interviews capture information too late, but stay interviews extract that information before a resignation.

Wading into the ranks might not be your idea of fun, but it’s necessary if you want to earn the trust of your subordinates. Whether you are a company officer or the fire chief, you must build relationships with your people. You must talk with them. Stay interviews offer the blueprint to restore organizational communication. The longer that you put them off, the more necessary they will become.