What is a stay survey in education?

I recently had a conversation with a teacher who is considering resigning. This person is a veteran teacher and has been successful in each school in which she has taught. She has impacted thousands of lives forever, and she’ll never truly know the true impact she has made.

However, like many other educators currently, she is burned out, tired, and ready for a change. It’s a culmination of stress, feeling undervalued, and long hours that has brought her to this point.

Also, like many other educators who are considering leaving, her employer has no idea she is at the breaking point and will most likely be working elsewhere next fall.

Teachers and staff don’t typically decide to resign overnight. Instead, it’s a process that takes weeks, months, or even years.

So the question becomes:

How can I identify the teachers and staff who are considering leaving… before it’s too late?

Many organizations provide their staff with an exit interview or exit survey upon them leaving since it’s supposed to help with future teacher retention. The hope is the person leaving will shed some light on their reasoning for resigning. This new-found knowledge will then help the organization make future decisions that will prevent unwanted turnover.

The problem with exit interviews or surveys is that it’s simply too late. The person has left the organization, and you’re left with an open position along with maybe an idea or two you can implement sometime in the future before it’s too late…again.

But does what you learn in the stay survey apply only to the person who left, or is it a common thread among the rest of your current employees? 🤔

Instead of relying on information collected from exit surveys, the key is to take action before it’s too late by implementing stay surveys.

Stay surveys

Stay surveys provide important and actionable data for district and school leaders to help them decrease burnout and turnover by identifying flight risks before it’s too late. They should be a core component in your employee experience and teacher retention strategies.

Stay surveys and pulse/engagement surveys are similar in that they can be provided to all members of the team. All teachers and staff are provided the same questions at the same time.

Individual answers are anonymous with pulse and engagement surveys, and the results are shared at a higher level (organization-wide or building-wide typically).

With stay surveys, employee names are collected and shared. After all the goal is to identify individual people who are flight risks and better understand their specific situation before they resign.

If your organization is large enough, we recommend stay survey results get shared with the human resources team or representative and not the employee's direct administrator or supervisor. Many employees would not be comfortable sharing their honest input with their principal or supervisor in fear of some type of retribution. If an HR team is not available, that’s okay as well. Just be sure to communicate the answers provided in the stay survey will not be used during performance reviews or evaluations.

The key to collecting your people’s real perceptions is to create an environment of trust and honesty. A human resources representative provides a non-evaluator the opportunity to view the results and then schedule follow-up conversations (interviews) with those whose feedback suggests they are unhappy, disgruntled, or are taking away from the organization. This conversation is a time to ask clarifying questions, identify trends in people’s responses, and determine specific next steps to take based on what was collected during the stay interview.

This HR representative can also look for trends across departments, grades, or even buildings to better diagnose the real challenges people are facing. Maybe the leadership in a certain building is poor? Maybe staff are struggling because of a certain demographic the school serves? Maybe it’s completely random and there is no identifiable “one cause”.

General information collected across stay interviews can be shared with building-level principals to help them be aware of any patterns of concerns raised.

And it’s all done BEFORE your people leave, and before you have another open position to try to fill….