Does your company carry out exit interviews as a matter of course?
Giving employees the opportunity to let you know why they are leaving can give you extremely valuable information you might not otherwise have obtained, and you will start to see the issues that contribute to employees' departures.
Granted, sometimes they can be real eye-openers in terms of problems in your organisation, but at least it gives you the opportunity to find out about, and deal with any problems so that you can (if you want to) try your best to improve retention levels.
It is often the way that employers find out that they have an ongoing problem with bullying, particularly when one of the management team is involved in this. The employees have felt that they were unable to raise the matter during their tenure at the company but may feel able to raise it with a different member of the management team during an exit interview.
The same is true of sexual harassment. If there is a spate of resignations from female workers then exit interviews may be able to help to establish if this is as a result of sexual harassment or misogynistic bullying. It may be nothing as serious and could even just be that they found better paying jobs elsewhere but exit interviews remain a good place to explore this type of concern.
A few tips though which employers may find useful:
- It's fine to ask the employee to complete a questionnaire which asks about reasons for leaving and their experiences working for the company, rather than attend a formal interview initially. Ask for these questionnaires to be sent to an independent team / person in the organisation rather than the employee's manager.
- If you are introducing exit interviews, don't ask employees' line managers to carry them out. If the manager's behaviour has contributed to an employee's decision to leave, you'll be hard pushed to get honest feedback.
This is a very important point as exit interviews are supposed to be a chance for the person leaving to give their honest reflections on the company, as well as providing their reasons for leaving. If their line manager was the problem, they won't feel comfortable saying that to them and may fear that they will endanger their chances of receiving a good reference.
- Have an agreed structure for exit interviews so that you ask a number of set questions. This way you can build up a bigger picture across common themes in the organisation when a few have been carried out.
- If you have common themes coming from exit interviews, you should really try and deal with them as soon as possible. If this means you have a report to make to Human Resources about the behaviour of their line manager, don’t duck the responsibility.
This is a chance to show leadership and integrity in a way that will win you a lot of trust and admiration from employees, even if it may be a bit frosty with some of the higher-ups for a while.
