Employee Centricity
How to make exit interviews count
Aishwarya Sinha Ray
May 7, 2024
5
mins
How to make exit interviews count?
It is awful when an excellent employee leaves. In fact, it’s difficult when loyal employees decide to move ahead in their careers to pursue their professional goals. In such situations, being critical or apathetic only lowers the morale of the employee and the concerned team. Therefore, an exit interview process should be a priority when an employee leaves, whether or not they get terminated. It gives you valuable information about your company and your employees.
What is an exit interview process?
As the name suggests, an exit interview process is a meeting with an employee that takes place before they offer their resignation when they want to leave the company. A member of HR or management usually leads the interview. The direct reporting manager of the employee must also attend for support and knowledge.
These interviews are useful as they provide valuable information about the company from the employee’s perspective. The employee doesn’t necessarily have to leave with a negative reason. It is a good time to get to know the actual reason and in fact, make the employee feel better about it.
Why invest in exit interviews?
Exit interviews are helpful in identifying information that might otherwise go unnoticed or unrevealed. As a result, exit interviews are an inexpensive and quick way to gather a large amount of data about the functioning of the company. This data can play a crucial role in designing recruitment as well as business strategy.
Exit interviews give business leaders and team managers a better understanding of what employees do and how they feel about it. The usual work days are quite busy for all employees so there’s no harm to assume that leaders and managers, too, are often occupied. That’s why perhaps they don’t usually get the time to connect and hence, they get to make the best use of exit interviews.
If employers use the information from exit interviews in such a way that employees see changes, they will feel more understood and respected. These feelings play a crucial role in improving retention, engagement, and employee satisfaction.
How to make the exit interview process count?
1. Conduct interviews with every employee who leaves
Try to have exit interviews with as many employees as possible. If the interviews cannot be face-to-face, try sending an email survey to the employee. You can even call them up and check with them regarding the survey completion.
2. Always pick the best interviewer
Most of the times exit interviews are done by the HR department. In some ways, this makes sense as employees may not feel comfortable speaking openly with their own supervisors or team leads. However, both HR and managers can involve themselves in this important process.
A study from the Harvard Business Review found that interviews conducted by an employee’s supervisor’s manager will most likely produce the required change.
3. Find the best time
The interview should take place in the last few days of employment. If it is done too early, the employee may not feel they can speak honestly and openly. Hence, the whole purpose of conducting the exit interview will be defeated.
4. Provide a structure and a form
Make the most of the exit interview process with a form or a plan for the meeting. With targeted questions, employers can get the most information in the limited amount of time.
5. Make confidentiality clear
Employees need to know that their feedback is confidential and anonymous. They need to know how their thoughts will be used to improve the business process. In fact, give them some confidence that you will use their input in various forms and functionalities so that they can be as elaborate as possible.
6. Ask important questions
Asking good questions is key to a successful exit interview process. When an employee leaves, the employer can ask questions they may not have been able to ask before. Be a bit careful about the employee's sentiments before asking a question.
Also read: 2 Questions to ask while creating an inclusive workforce
7. Leave the employee feeling good
The exit interview process is sometimes the last interaction an employee will have with management or HR. It is important to be patient, friendly, and positive. The employee that leaves will either spread positive things about the company or negative things about the company, sometimes depending on how they were treated when they left. Give the company the best chance by making the exit interview a positive experience.
8. Have more than one interview
Some companies have the first interview, but also a follow-up interview a few months later.
According to research, employees can change their opinions when given time to reflect. 59% changed their reasons for leaving the organization and 100% gave a reason for leaving in the follow-up interview even if they didn’t give one in the first interview.
There are many steps to planning a productive exit interview, but, when done correctly, they provide benefits to the company and to the remaining employees. Making the most of when an employee leaves by having an excellent exit interview is a good step toward saving money, improving engagement, and increasing retention.
9. Conduct exit interviews in person
Although exit interviews can be conducted via written or online surveys, over the phone, through chat or email, the best practice is to conduct them in person.
In other words, the interviewer will be able to read an employee’s body language and ask follow up questions in order to get the most out of these interviews.
10. Make the exit interview like a regular one-on-one
Make sure you conduct exit interviews in a private setting, one-on-one - just an interviewer and a departing employee.
Conducting an exit interview in a public setting or in a panel style interview with multiple interviewers can be intimidating for your departing employees.
11. Create an atmosphere that’s comfortable
The way to making exit interview count is to ensure all the required conditions for an open, honest conversation.
That way, you will create an atmosphere in which employees who are leaving the organization will feel comfortable and safe.
12. Explain the purpose of exit interviews
State clearly that you conduct exit interviews in order to make positive changes.
Ask for their help and highlight how much you’d value their honesty and constructive feedback.
13. Be consistent with your speech
My final tip for conducting exit interviews is to be consistent. What do I mean by that?
Ask all your leaving employees the same set of predetermined exit interview questions to maintain honesty and consistency.
Top 3 benefits of exit interviews:
1. Cut employee turnover costs
Exit interviews are an employer’s unique chance to find out why their employees choose to leave.
During the exit interview process, employers can get valuable data regarding the employee's working experience.
Doing this will enhance their company’s retention rates. Employers will save a significant amount of money associated with high employee turnover.
2. Enhance recruiting
Exit interviews are extremely useful for attracting employees.
By using the information from the employees who leave, employers can adjust and improve their employee value proposition.
3. Provide closure
Exit interview processes are important because they provide closure to the employer as well as to the employees.
An ideal exit interview process will make both parties feel good about their experience together. This will allow them to maintain a positive work relationship even after they don’t work together any longer.
What are some exit interview questions?
Here are some questions an employer might ask during an exit interview.
- How would you describe the company and the job to a friend?
- What benefits does the new company/position provide that we do not?
- What did you like or dislike about your job?
- What did you think about management?
- How can the management make improvements?
- Have you ever expressed criticism, and how did you feel it was handled?
- How would you characterize our business culture?
- What suggestions would you have to help us enhance retention?
- What steps can we take to improve training and development?
- Do you have any other topics you would like to discuss?
Conclusion : Make exit interviews as useful as possible
In conclusion, even though there are benefits of an exit interview as an HR tool for gaining valuable insights into a company’s ability to attract and retain the best employees. However, you shouldn’t rely on these interviews as the only source of information about employee experience in your company.
You should conduct recurring employee interviews, check-ins, and surveys to get feedback and obtain data on employee experience, job satisfaction, employee engagement, and employee retention in your company.
Conducting these surveys regularly will ensure that you obtain all the relevant information on time to act upon it. That way, you’ll have enough time to intervene and fix the relationships and working conditions at your company in order to keep your employees happy and engaged - and far away from exit interview process in the first place!
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