Exit interviews happen after it is too late. A valued veterinary technician or front-desk team member has already accepted another job, and the practice manager is left recording reasons that no longer help the person who just walked out the door. AAHA's "Stay, Please" retention study — surveying over 12,000 veterinary professionals — found that at any given moment, 30% or more of veterinary practice team members are considering leaving their current position. Among DVMs specifically, the figure is 34%. Nine out of ten professionals who leave clinical practice say they will never return.

Stay interviews are the structural opposite of exit interviews. Instead of asking why someone left, you ask why they stay — and what might change that. The conversation is proactive, low-cost, and, when run correctly, one of the highest-ROI retention tools available to a veterinary practice manager or medical director.

This article covers the mechanics: how often to run stay interviews, what to ask, how to document the conversation without creating legal exposure, how to handle compensation questions honestly, and — the step most practices skip — how to follow through on what you hear.

The case for stay interviews in veterinary practice

AAHA's "Stay, Please" study identified six primary retention factors across all veterinary roles: working as a team, practicing sound medicine, doing meaningful work, fair compensation, scheduling flexibility, and feeling appreciated. The study's Phase 2, released in February 2025, added role-specific detail: what keeps a credentialed technician differs from what keeps a DVM or a CSR, and the gap between expectation and reality in each factor predicts attrition risk better than satisfaction scores alone.

The average annual turnover rate in veterinary practices is 23%, according to AAHA Compensation & Benefits data. Veterinary technician turnover runs even higher at 23.4%, and receptionist turnover reaches 32.5%. VetPartners reports that staff turnover ratios have climbed from 13% five years ago to 25% at the end of 2024, with the most significant reasons cited as lack of utilization, poor culture, and low wages.

Gallup estimates that replacing a departing employee costs 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary. AAHA calculates that a practice with ten employees that loses three team members in one year — each earning $50,000 — faces a $75,000 to $300,000 impact. At the profession level, with approximately 189,000 DVMs and credentialed technicians working in the United States, a 30% turnover rate costs between $1.4 billion and $5.6 billion annually.

Stay interviews target the portion of that 30% who are still reachable — the people who are thinking about leaving but have not yet acted. That is the window where a conversation can change a decision.

Cadence: how often and with whom

Frequency

Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, whose work on stay interviews is widely cited in veterinary management, recommend conducting stay interviews at least once per year for every team member. Vetsource, drawing on Kaye's framework, suggests an interval as short as every 90 days for key employees — kept short (fifteen to twenty minutes) and low-key.

A practical cadence for a veterinary practice:

• New hires: at 30, 60, and 90 days. Cleveland Clinic's workforce retention task force found that a high volume of caregivers leave during their first year; early check-ins catch onboarding problems before they become resignation letters.
• All team members: every six months, scheduled separately from performance reviews.
• High-performers and critical roles: quarterly, informal, fifteen minutes.

The key principle: stay interviews are separate from performance evaluations. A performance review assesses the employee. A stay interview assesses the job. Mixing the two creates a conflict — the employee cannot be candid about what frustrates them while simultaneously being evaluated on their performance.

Who conducts the interview

The direct supervisor or practice manager should conduct the stay interview — not HR, not the practice owner unless they are the direct supervisor. The relationship that matters is the day-to-day working relationship. If the employee reports to the medical director, the medical director does the interview. If they report to the practice manager, the practice manager does it.

For practice owners: if you are the direct supervisor, conduct the interview yourself. If you are not — if a practice manager handles day-to-day operations — let the practice manager do it. Stay interviews mediated through a layer of management the employee rarely interacts with feel performative.

Timing and setting

Schedule the conversation in advance. Do not ambush someone between appointments. Choose a private setting — an office with a closed door, a walk outside the building, a coffee shop nearby. The ivet360 guide on stay interviews in veterinary practice recommends mixing up the location to put the employee at ease: "Grab a coffee, go out to lunch, take a walk."

Avoid conducting stay interviews during the busiest weeks of the year (spring vaccination season, holiday boarding rush) or immediately after a disciplinary conversation. The context matters.

The question set

Stay interviews work because the questions are open-ended and forward-looking. The goal is to understand what keeps the person engaged and what might pull them away — not to extract a list of complaints.

Core questions

These five questions, adapted from Kaye and Jordan-Evans' framework and used across veterinary and healthcare retention programs, form the backbone of a stay interview:

1. What do you look forward to when you come to work each day? Identifies intrinsic motivators — the work itself, relationships with patients and clients, specific clinical tasks — that you can protect and amplify.
2. What are you learning here? gauges professional development. If the answer is "nothing," the employee is at higher attrition risk.
3. Why do you stay at this practice? Captures the employee's own language about what they value. This is the answer you wish you had in an exit interview, obtained while the person is still here.
4. When was the last time you thought about leaving, and what prompted it? The most candid question. Do not be surprised if the answer is "last week." The goal is to learn the trigger, not to talk the person out of the feeling.
5. What can I do to make your experience here better? Transfers the initiative to the employee. The answers are often smaller and more specific than managers expect: a more predictable schedule, better equipment, a different shift rotation, a standing invitation to contribute to protocol development.

Follow-up probes

For each core question, be prepared to follow up:

• "Can you tell me more about that?"
• "What would that look like if it were working well?"
• "Is there anything else on your mind about your role here?"

Questions to avoid

• "Are you happy here?" Too vague. Most people say yes regardless of reality.
• "What's wrong with the practice?" Too broad and invites grievance rather than constructive insight.
• "Would you like a raise?" Everyone says yes. It does not tell you whether compensation is a retention risk or whether other factors matter more.
• Any question that can be answered with a single word.

Documentation boundaries

Stay interviews create information that is valuable for retention planning but sensitive from an employment-law perspective. Document enough to act on; do not document so much that you create a discoverable record of promises or complaints that could be used against the practice in a legal proceeding.

What to document

• The date, time, and participants of the conversation.
• Key themes in summary form: "Schedule flexibility came up as important; currently satisfied with team dynamics."
• Action items the manager commits to: "Will explore shifting Thursday shift start time by 30 minutes."
• Follow-up timeline: "Check back in 30 days on schedule adjustment."

What not to document

• Verbatim quotations attributed to the employee about specific colleagues.
• Speculation about whether the employee is a flight risk.
• Compensation comparisons or promises that have not been approved.
• Any statement that could be read as a guarantee of future promotion, raise, or role change.

Where to store notes

Keep stay-interview notes in a manager-only file — not in the employee's personnel file. Personnel files are subject to legal discovery, internal audit, and employee review in many jurisdictions. A manager's private working notes about retention conversations carry different legal weight. Consult your practice's employment attorney on the specific rules in your state.

Compensation signals

Compensation comes up in most stay interviews. It came up in the AAHA "Stay, Please" study as one of the top retention factors across all roles. Handling it poorly is worse than not handling it at all.

Be honest about what you can and cannot do

If the employee asks about a raise and you know the practice's compensation budget for the year is set, say so: "Our salary review cycle is in January, and I will make sure your request is part of that conversation. I cannot commit to a change outside that timeline." Do not promise to "look into it" with no intention of following up. The Vet Recruiter's guide on stay interviews emphasizes that trust is the foundation of the conversation; a broken promise destroys trust faster than a candid "no."

Know the market

Before conducting stay interviews, review current compensation benchmarks for each role. AAHA's Compensation & Benefits report provides role-specific salary data by region. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports median wages by occupation and metropolitan area. If a credentialed technician tells you they are underpaid and your data confirms they are at or above the local median, you can have a fact-based conversation. If your data confirms they are underpaid, you have a retention decision to make.

Separate compensation from appreciation

The AAHA study found that fair compensation and feeling appreciated are distinct factors — both matter, and one does not substitute for the other. A practice that pays competitively but never recognizes individual contributions will still lose people. A practice that showers staff with praise but pays below market will also lose them. If compensation is competitive and the employee is still raising it as a concern, the real issue may be perceived fairness, not absolute dollars.

The follow-through loop

The step that converts a stay interview from a feel-good exercise into a retention tool is follow-through. Without it, the conversation becomes a broken promise — the employee shared something vulnerable, the manager nodded, and nothing changed. The next time the employee considers leaving, they will not wait for the next stay interview.

Close the loop within one week

After each stay interview, follow up within seven days with a brief message: "Thank you for the conversation last Tuesday. Here is what I heard, and here is what I am working on." This confirms the manager listened and signals action. The message does not need to promise a solution — it promises attention.

Identify themes across interviews

After conducting five to ten stay interviews, review themes across the group. If one person mentions schedule inflexibility, it is an individual concern. If four out of ten mention it, it is a systemic issue. The AAHA Phase 2 study found that addressing practice-wide factors — the "base of the pillar" — has the largest impact on overall retention, while role-specific factors require targeted interventions.

Build a retention action plan

From the themes, create a short list of concrete actions (three to five, not twenty) with owners and deadlines. Examples:

• Adjust shift-swap policy by end of quarter (owner: practice manager).
• Add a quarterly CE budget for credentialed technicians (owner: medical director).
• Create a technician-lead role for the morning treatment shift (owner: practice manager, with DVM input).

Share the action plan with the team. Transparency about what you heard and what you are doing about it builds the trust that makes future stay interviews more candid.

Revisit in the next interview

The next stay interview with the same employee should begin with a brief check on the previous conversation: "Last time we talked, you mentioned X. Here is what has changed. Has it made a difference?" This closes the feedback loop and demonstrates that the process leads to real outcomes.

Measuring the program

Track these metrics to assess whether the stay-interview program is working:

• Turnover rate by role, measured quarterly. The AAHA benchmark is 23% annual team turnover; best practice is closer to 13%.
• Retention of targeted employees — the specific people identified as high-risk during stay interviews.
• Employee engagement trends — tracked through a simple quarterly pulse survey with five to ten questions, not an annual marathon survey.
• Completion rate — what percentage of eligible employees received a stay interview in the past six months. If the rate is below 80%, the program is not running at scale.

The ivet360 analysis of AAHA's data notes that only 7% of practices track turnover reasons. If your practice is in the 93% that does not, the stay-interview program — combined with basic turnover tracking — already puts you ahead of most veterinary employers.

Sources

• American Animal Hospital Association. Stay, Please: Factors that Support Retention and Drive Attrition in the Veterinary Profession. February 2024. https://24051120.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/24051120/Stay_Please_AAHA_Retention_Study_2024_02182024.pdf
• American Animal Hospital Association. Stay, Please: Phase 2 — Conclusions and Next Steps. February 2025. https://www.aaha.org/resources/stay-please-phase-2/conclusions-and-next-steps
• American Veterinary Medical Association. Study: Fair Pay, Appreciation for Work Top Factors in Employee Retention. AVMA News, 2024. https://www.avma.org/news/study-fair-pay-appreciation-work-top-factors-employee-retention
• American Veterinary Medical Association. Using Stay Interviews to Increase Staff Retention. https://www.avma.org/news/using-stay-interviews-increase-staff-retention
• Vetsource. Use Stay Interviews to Reduce Unwanted Turnover. https://vetsource.com/blog/how-to-use-stay-interviews-to-reduce-unwanted-turnover
• The Vet Recruiter. The Importance of Stay Interviews and How to Conduct Them. https://thevetrecruiter.com/the-importance-of-stay-interviews-and-how-to-conduct-them
• ivet360. Stay Interviews Could Save Your Veterinary Team This Year. https://ivet360.com/stay-interviews-could-save-your-veterinary-team-this-year
• AAHA. Does Your Practice Have a Turnover Problem? AAHA Trends Magazine. https://www.aaha.org/trends-magazine/publications/does-your-practice-have-a-turnover-problem
• VetPartners. Staff Turnover Costs vs. Training Costs. VetPartners Utilization Guide. https://utilization-guide.vetpartners.org/guide/13-5
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Veterinary Technologists and Technicians. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/veterinary-technologists-and-technicians.htm