Performing Exit Interviews

Exit interviews provide an incredible opportunity to gain honest, insightful feedback into an employee’s time at your company. After all, most employees feel comfortable providing candid feedback when they have already turned in their notice. Here are a few tips to ensure you are gleaning the most from conducting employee exit interviews:

 

Avoid the “check off the box” approach to exit interviews.

 

Take exit interviews seriously. The exit interview isn’t just a way to get insight into why one employee has resigned. Rather, it can provide information that can be helpful in determining whether there are systemic issues affecting the organization as a whole. Feedback from departing employees ultimately may or may not be useful, but it often provides at least a glimpse into the positives and negatives of working at your company that you may not already be aware of. Take time to write down thoughtful questions you will be asking your departing employees, and as a rule of thumb, block off an hour for each employee conversation. Before you start the exit interview, explain to your departing employee the structure of the exit interview, its purpose, why you value their feedback, and that you would greatly appreciate candid answers to help maintain or improve aspects of the work environment.

 

Consider the best structure for your exit interviews.

 

Exit interviews can be formal or informal. With larger companies, exit interviews typically follow the same format with identical questions and clearly documented answers. Additionally, some very large companies outsource exit interviews to encourage as much transparency as possible with departing employees. For a startup or much smaller company, an exit interview might take the form of a sit-down conversation to determine the root causes of an employee’s departure and to discuss the employee’s time working at the company. Whatever the form of the exit interview, it should cover several areas to include the reason for leaving, positive aspects of the company, negative aspects of the company, and suggestions for improvement.

 

Learn why the employee is really leaving.

 

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when conducting an exit interview is to ask a question, hear the employee’s rehearsed answer, and move on. Just like a good reporter, don’t shy away from follow-up questions to make sure you really understand the full picture. So you’ve found that an employee is leaving your company to work at a similar company in a similar role. Why? Dive into specifics here. Remember, exiting employees don’t always want to answer all exit interview questions, and they may choose not to. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask them about all the details. For example, learning that an employee is leaving for a lateral move should hint at several possibilities:

• The employee is not satisfied with his or her current company.
• The employee is not satisfied with his or her current job.
• The employee wants more down the line (career progression, etc.).
• Something logistically is better with the new opportunity (drive time, pay, benefits, PTO, etc.).

It is your job to leave the exit interview with a full understanding of the real reason the employee is leaving.

 

Leave a good last impression.

 

Of course the primary objective of an exit interview is to get feedback about an employee’s tenure at your company. But an additional (often overlooked) outcome of the exit interview is to leave departing employees with a positive impression of your company. Sure, maybe your company wasn’t the perfect fit for them, but it’s still possible to part ways on respectful terms. Remember the basics here:

• Take the exit interview session as an opportunity to explain basic exit logistics, like when the employee will receive the final paycheck, when their benefits will cut off, when they will receive their PTO pay-out, etc.
• Be sure to also verify you have the departing employee’s most current home address and phone number on file for benefits paperwork or in case you need to contact the employee for some reason after the date of termination.
• Set aside at least 10 minutes to answer any questions the employee may have, and make sure the employee feels comfortable contacting you after his/her final day with any other questions that come up.
• Thank the employee for their time at your company, and sincerely wish them the best of luck at their new opportunity. A simple “thank you” goes a long way.

 

Consider stay interviews.

 

One of the best parts of exit interviews is that employees often provide very candid feedback. One of the most frustrating aspects is that once you have that feedback, it is almost always too late to try to retain a good employee. For that reason alone, many companies have implemented “stay interviews,” which are similar to exit interviews in nature but are conducted with employees who haven’t given any type of notice. This approach may or may not be helpful for your company, but it is worth considering. An effective stay interview can serve as a mechanism to obtain valuable feedback that can be acted on for active employees. For a stay interview to be successful, it is vital that employees feel comfortable providing truthful feedback without any fear of backlash.

 

Do something with the feedback.

 

For both exit and stay interviews, if you provide a comfortable setting and ask the right follow-up questions, chances are that you will receive valuable feedback. That’s the easy part. Analyzing the feedback, looking at feedback trends, and enacting change is the difficult part. Most employees will provide pieces of both positive and negative feedback. It’s your job to identify what positive feedback about the work environment needs to be maintained and which negative aspects need to be addressed. Many, if not most, companies who conduct these interviews fail at doing something with the feedback. But, without doing something with the feedback, the entire purpose of asking these questions is lost.