Every restaurant runs exit interviews, or at least pretends to. Someone gives two weeks notice, you ask why they're leaving, they say something vague about "a better opportunity," and you move on. That conversation is useless. The person has one foot out the door and no reason to give you the truth.
The better move is a stay interview. It's a short, planned conversation with a current employee, someone you want to keep, done while they're still fully engaged. The goal is simple: find out what's working, what's close to a breaking point, and what would make them leave before they actually start looking.
Most operators skip this because it feels soft, like something HR does at a corporate office, not something that fits a Tuesday lunch rush. But turnover is the single biggest cost most restaurants never actually measure. Replacing a line cook runs you anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 dollars once you count the job posting, the interview time, the training hours, the mistakes on the line, and the slower ticket times while they ramp up. A 20 minute conversation is cheap insurance against that.
Who gets one and when. You don't need to stay-interview your whole staff every month. Start with your best people, the ones you'd be in real trouble losing. Do it at the 90 day mark, then again around the one year mark, and anytime you notice a shift in someone's energy, they've gone from picking up extra shifts to turning them down, or they've stopped speaking up in pre-shift.
What to actually ask. Keep it conversational, not a survey. Good questions:
What's the best part of your week here right now?
Is there anything that's starting to wear on you?
If you could change one thing about how we run this place, what would it be?
What would make you think about leaving?
What do you need from me that you're not getting?
That last one is the one that matters most. Most people who quit don't leave because of pay. They leave because they didn't feel seen, they didn't get a clear path to more hours or more responsibility, or a manager kept promising something and never followed through.
Do something with the answer. A stay interview that doesn't lead to action is worse than not having one, because now the employee knows you asked and did nothing. If someone says they want more closing shifts, adjust the schedule. If they say training felt disorganized, fix the checklist. If they say they never hear when they do something right, start saying it out loud in pre-shift.
This is where a lot of managers lose the thread. You have the conversation, you mean to follow up, and then the week gets busy and it falls off. That's exactly the kind of thing that needs to live somewhere other than your memory. If you're tracking these conversations and the follow-through in Wingman, you can log what someone said, set a reminder to check back in two weeks, and actually see whether the fix happened. It turns a good intention into a task with a deadline instead of a note that disappears into the shift.
Watch the pattern, not just the person. If three different servers all mention the same frustration in their stay interviews, that's not a personality problem, that's a system problem. Maybe the schedule keeps coming out late. Maybe the tip pool split feels unfair. Maybe closing duties always fall on the same two people. One comment is an opinion. Three comments is data, and it should change how you run the floor.
Hiring good people is hard enough right now. The cheapest way to fix your hiring problem is to stop losing the people you already have. A stay interview costs you twenty minutes and a little discomfort. A resignation costs you weeks of scrambling, a slower team, and a new hire who might not even work out.
Talk to your best people before they start looking elsewhere, not after they've already made up their mind. Want to see how Wingman helps you track these conversations, follow through on what you promised, and catch turnover risk before it turns into a two weeks notice? Take a look at what it can do for your team.