Stay interviews for hourly teams
Your people already know why they're leaving.
Ask them while they still work for you.
A 15-minute text conversation with each person on the team, run by someone who doesn't work for you. You get the pattern, the quotes and three things to fix. Nobody's name comes back. It's a conversation, not a survey, and the difference shows in what people say.
- No app to install
- English + Spanish
- Report in two weeks
Question 4 of about 9
The problem
They say it on breaks. They don't say it to you.
Not to their supervisor, because he might be the reason. Not to HR, because HR is management. By the exit interview, they've accepted the other job and you get the polite version.
"I can handle nights. I can't handle finding out Thursday that my Monday is gone."
"It's not the work. It's getting yelled at in front of the crew for something that wasn't mine."
"Day shift gets a dollar more for the same work. Nobody's said why."
"Two weeks' notice on the schedule and I'd stop looking tomorrow."
Illustrative quotes. Real reports only show a quote when the identifying details are gone and at least five people raised the theme.
Not a survey
This is not a survey.
There are good pulse-survey tools for hourly teams now, and they're fine at counting. What a survey can't do is ask a follow-up. "Rate your supervisor 1 to 5" gets you a 3. "What happened last Thursday" gets you the reason.
We ask nine, and change the tenth depending on what you said.
We talk to one team, this month, because something's wrong there.
Ours ends up as six pages with the quotes in them.
We don't work for you, and we say so before the first question.
How it works
Four steps. You do the first one; we do the rest.
1
Pick a team
Name it, say roughly how many people, tell us what's prompting this. You get a link.
2
Send the link
Text it, tape it up in the break room, read it at the huddle. We give you the words.
3
They talk
Fifteen minutes on their phone with an interviewer who opens by saying it doesn't work for you. Nine questions. Follow-ups when something's real.
4
Read the report
Unlocks once five people finish. Themes by how many raised them, quotes, three things to do this quarter.
The report
Six pages. Your operations manager will read all of them.
Not a dashboard with forty charts. Three numbers, the themes ranked by how many people raised them, the quotes that make each one real, and three fixes in the order you should do them.
Round 3 · Warehouse, Night shift · 24 of 31 completed
9
likely to leave
14
would stay if one thing changed
Why people are thinking about leaving
Who it's for
Works for any team. Built for the ones on their feet.
Most of the tools in this space were built for people at desks, and the ones built for the floor are surveys. Your people are on their feet, on a shift, with a phone in their pocket. That's where the conversation happens.
Warehouses & logistics
One supervisor, forty pickers, two shifts
Manufacturing
Mandatory overtime and a lead who's been there twenty years
Healthcare support
CNAs, techs, dietary, EVS: fastest turnover, least asked
Hospitality & retail
Front desk, housekeeping, floor: in the fifteen minutes between rushes
The promise
What we promise your people. Out loud, before they start.
These are on the first screen every employee sees. They're why people tell us things they haven't told you. You can't edit them, and you wouldn't want to.
We never store a name, email, phone number or device ID with a transcript. Timestamps are rounded to the hour.
A 15-minute conversation about your job. Nobody here will know it was you.
- I'm not your manager and I don't work for your company.
- Nothing you say is shown to anyone with your name on it.
- A topic only shows up in the report if at least 5 people raised it.
- You can skip any question or stop at any time.
Founder
I ran HR for a thousand bus drivers and mechanics. They never told me the real thing either.
For fourteen years I managed compensation and benefits at a transit authority with five unions. I sat in the exit interviews. I read the engagement surveys. I knew the scores were the polite version before the results came back, because I'd heard what people said in the garage.
The problem was never that people wouldn't talk. It was that they wouldn't talk to us. Heardby is what I wish I'd had: someone who isn't management, asking the right questions, bringing back the pattern.
Joe T. Kim
Founder · 17 years in HR · Detroit
Run one round. Pick the team you're most worried about.
The first round is free. If the report doesn't tell you one thing you didn't know, we'd rather you didn't pay for a second.