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Summary: Exit interviews help you understand why employees leave and how to improve your workplace. This guide covers their importance, what to include, and best practices.
What Are Exit Interviews?
Employees leaving your organization is not great, but you can turn employee departures into an opportunity to improve your organization and increase employee retention. How, you may ask? The answer is exit interviews.
Exit interviews are the final conversation between the departing employee and the organization. A member of the HR department typically conducts exit interviews to gather valuable feedback from employees, understanding their reasons for leaving, their experience at the company, and how this information can be utilized to benefit the organization.
What Is Included In Exit Interviews?
Here is a list of what you should include in your exit interviews.
Reasons For Leaving
It is crucial to understand why your employee is leaving the organization so you can identify any problematic areas that need improvement to prevent further employee departures.
Don’t just ask for one reason; try to have an open conversation with the employee so you can have quality material and understand the core motivations behind the employee’s departure.
Some important topics to explore include work culture, collaboration opportunities, total compensation, whether they think they have everything to be successful, manager experience, etc.
Job Satisfaction
It is important to know if the employee was satisfied with their contribution to the organization. Did they feel their role was important? Were they challenged enough to stay engaged with their expected role?
Knowing if the employee had a clear understanding of what was expected of them is essential to know that the leaders and managers are providing a clear success roadmap and setting goals for the employees to succeed.
Manager Feedback
Ask your departing employees about their experience working with their managers. Managers are the key to an employee’s success or failure. If managers cannot guide their direct reports in the right direction, empower them to improve, or invest in them to upskill them, it will lead to lower employee morale and resignations.
When you have insights into the key persons leading your employees, you can take action and train new managers to be successful.
Compensation & Benefits
Ask if the employees were happy with the organization’s compensation & benefits structure. Employers may think they’re offering competitive compensation and benefits, but if multiple employees are leaving your organization only because they were offered a significant increase in compensation and better benefits, it’s a sign to reevaluate your total compensation and make improvements.
Career Development Opportunities
Did your employees feel supported throughout their time with your organization? How far were they able to get on the corporate ladder? Did they have enough challenges and opportunities to broaden their skills and learn something new?
Employees tend to move on from a company if they feel stagnant. Try to learn about their professional journey within your organization to assess if your company keeps employees motivated and engaged through career development opportunities or if you need to introduce practices to help with professional development.
Suggestions For Improvement
Asking departing employees about their opinion on what you can do to improve and retain employees better makes them feel their insights are valued and appreciated.
Sometimes employers can miss little things that may cause employees to leave, so asking employees to provide suggestions and feedback helps uncover missed details and potentially improves employee retention.
Final Thoughts & Questions
In the end, thank the employee for their time and feedback. It is a good practice to spare some time at the end for employees to ask any questions they might have for you or the leadership team.
Importance of Exit Interviews
Here are some reasons why you should conduct exit interviews.
Gathering Important Feedback
Exit interviews are structured to allow employers to gather important employee feedback about their experience at the organization. It’s not just their work experience but how they felt about being supported for career advancement, and how they found the company culture. Employees tend to be more honest when leaving an organization, so this is an excellent opportunity to ask meaningful questions to help positively shape your organization.
Improving Employee Experience
Since exit interviews gather employee feedback, you can use essential employee suggestions to improve your policies, compensation structure, and culture to work on potential shortcomings and enhance employee experience. Using the data collected wisely can create a more positive working environment and make employees feel valued over time.
Reducing Employee Turnover
Through exit interviews, organizations can understand the reasons behind employee departures. When studying possible causes of employee turnover, employers can focus on eliminating the factors that force an employee to leave. Targeting these causes helps employers maintain retention and lower recruitment costs.
Ending Employment On Good Terms
If the exit interviews are done right, the employee leaves the company on a good note. A well-conducted exit interview helps build your reputation and offers connecting opportunities to your potential top talent through your former employees. A good exit interview also opens the door for reconnecting and rehiring the departing employee at a later date.
Best Practices For Conducting Exit Interviews
Here are some best practices we recommend for conducting successful exit interviews.
Communicating With Employees
Employees should not have an exit interview without knowing what to expect. Let the employee know what the conversation is about, what kind of information you’re trying to gather, and how long it will take.
Inform the employee about having an exit interview before their last day, at least a few days before scheduling, and ask them what days and times work best for them. Setting expectations for the conversation helps the employee prepare better, which leads to more authentic feedback and helps drive the right changes.
Using Standard Templates
It’s important that you have a standard set of questions to ask in an exit interview. Using the same questions in every exit interview ensures consistent feedback and helps identify trends and patterns over time. The trends and patterns can help employers know the real cause of employee turnover and address it to avoid future departures and keep employees engaged.
Forming a Friendly Environment
Opening up the conversation in a friendly manner helps employees to feel comfortable and to be more honest. When you speak in a way that makes employees feel they are being heard, they provide better feedback.
Analyzing Feedback
Conducting exit interviews alone is not enough. Exit interviews help employers gather essential data and understand the real reasons behind employee departures, as well as the areas of improvement.
Once you have gathered a good amount of data over time, you can analyze the feedback and plan actionable steps to improve the organization.
For example, if 3 out of 5 employees left due to a better compensation and benefits package in another organization, the company needs to re-evaluate its total compensation structure and provide more attractive benefits and better pay. Similarly, if 8 out of 10 departing employees cite a lack of training as a reason for their exit, the company knows that it needs to focus on training team members moving forward.
Monitoring Trends For Improvement
Once you have implemented action plans for improvement, keep monitoring the trends and see if your changes have reduced employee turnover associated with a specific reason. Continuously monitoring progress and future trends helps employers eliminate as many reasons for employee turnover as possible.
Charlotte is an Human Resources Information Systems and Martech expect, Charlotte has worked for major brands in the industry including FactorialHR and Tooltester. Originally from Manchester, UK, with a Bachelor's degree from the Manchester Metropolitan University, Charlotte currently lives in Barcelona, Spain.