When an organization has a high employee turnover, you know something is wrong there. Most companies that take their work and employee management seriously take certain measures to figure out the reasons for the exodus.
Conducting exit interviews with departing employees is one of the best ways to get to the bottom of the problem and find solutions to the problem. Employee exit interviews can help reduce the attrition rate in a business.
A research data from Harvard Business Review suggests that many companies don’t even engage in exit interviews as a standard process. Many others that do merely collect information but don’t really work towards analyzing it or fail to make changes suggested during the interviews.
However, exit interviews are not something people are very fond of. In plain terms, the process sucks – just like how separating couples take out their bitterness during their divorce settlements.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are many things you can do to make your exit interviews smooth-sailing and less awkward. Identifying the right kind of technology to facilitate the process is usually a good start.
What’s Exactly Is an Employee Exit Interview?
An employee exit interview is a final chance for employers to formally collect valuable data to know why people want to quit their jobs. An exit interview is face-to-face and upfront, which is why it is a good source for gathering objective information. Compare that to employee satisfaction surveys where the responses are cautious and sugar-coated because respondents are either influenced by confirmation bias or they don’t want to look bad to their employer.
While an exit interview shouldn’t be the first attempt to figure out problems related to a company’s attrition, it is a very handy process to identify a pattern.
Exit Interview for Employees: Frequently Asked Questions
The common employee exit interview questions contain a wide array of questions, and a few of them are very specific to organizations. The answers to these interviews reveal a lot about the people’s attitudes and their motive to move on to greener pastures.
If you, as an HR person, are wondering about what to focus on your exit interview process, consider the following questions as pointers:
- Why are you leaving the organization?
- How did you get along with the manager and your team?
- Were there any problem areas you saw in your team’s dynamics?
- What made you look for a new job and accept an offer?
- What was the best part of your job?
- Did you communicate about your problems with your team members/manager during your time of employment? If not, why?
- Were you informed about new company policies?
- What are a few things that could have been done better by your managers?
- What did you like the least?
This set of questions might look like a no-brainer, and yet, it is an absolute imperative. It’s better to keep these questions as specific as possible in order to get clear, specific feedback that will help your company improve your future hiring strategy.
The Challenges
While exit interviews are great, the HR department might sometimes come across certain scenarios that can create roadblocks from making the most of this opportunity. Some of them include:
- If problems in your corporate culture runs deep, exit interviews aren’t going to be particularly beneficial.
- Asking generic, shallow questions will not yield meaningful feedback.
- As much as they are valuable, exit interviews take time. The HR team needs to parse data, analyze it, and implement the suggestions that are viable.
- There’s no strategic approach when it comes to collecting data for the purpose of making organizational changes.
- Not all employees are comfortable being open in exit interviews. The HR should create a conducive environment to address this concern.
How To Conduct Exit Interviews?
With a little bit of intelligence, you can design a neat, hands-free exit interview for employees that can give good results to improving your existing employee engagement efforts. Here are a few tips on how to equip your HR to device a great exit interview:
Remove human participation
If you think deserting employees are uncomfortable about giving blunt responses in person, maybe you can come up with a way to carry it out impersonally. Document your interview questions on a digital platform and encourage employees to submit their responses electronically. If the exit interviews are happening en masse, you can give them the freedom to be anonymous to maintain confidentiality.
Experiment with questions
If you are not getting quality data with the current format, you may want to test out new set of questions. You can map the questions back to other feedback approaches in your company like internal surveys, engagement polls, etc. The idea is to be true to your mission in finding out the key reasons why people leave and if that can be changed to improve employee retention.
Automate the process
This can be the best and biggest step for your company to take the exit interviews to the next level. Like many other artillery processes that can take the help of an automated technology to run better, exit interviews can function efficiently if you can automate the process. The first place to start is by choosing the right automation app for handling exit interviews.
Over To You
An automated exit interview app can guarantee confidentiality, make the employee offboarding process more formalized, save HR department a ton of their time organizing it, and work as a repository to reflect back on. You can trust Kissflow to cut through the inefficiencies and speed up things for the HR department. Go ahead, give it a try – sign up for a free demo of Kissflow HR Cloud today!
.webp)
