Who Needs To Fill Out An Exit Interview
There are two main ways companies tend to complete exit interviews. The first is HR managers ask the questions and then fill out the employee’s responses during the meeting. The other way the employee will complete an exit interview form before the meeting and then discuss their responses with their HR manager throughout the meeting afterward.
Either way, the process must stay within the HR department due to some of the sections being based around leadership. Therefore, if the employee is concerned their answers will get back to their leadership team they may not answer truthfully. This prevents the beneficial feedback from reaching your company and helping improve your organization as a whole.
Have a look into our 360 feedback guide to see how this process can benefit your company, and how our 360 feedback app can streamline and make producing feedback a simple and easy process.
Exit Interview Survey Software And Tool
Using QuestionPro Workforce to conduct exit interviews can be a good start. HR managers can use the survey tool and platform to conduct exit interviews, gather crucial employee data, and analyze it to make informed changes in the people processes. Key four uses or utilities of using an exit interview software or platform are as follows:
- Saves time: The tool comes with pre-set templates that you can send to your employees. You may modify the templates or create an entirely new one both the options are quick. The platform is user-friendly and saves a lot of time.
- Access control: When conducting employee exit surveys, HR managers need to be mindful of privacy and anonymity. This means you may have to limit interview access for some people. These tools come with the settings and options to access to certain people, thereby ensuring privacy and security.
- Insights: Collecting information is only stage one. Gathering insights and using that information for positive changes in your HR processes is the next step. These tools provide trend analysis, sentiment analysis, etc. to go deep into finding the root causes of issues.
- Customization: Exit interview portals can be customized to match your organizations branding, which lends credibility and improves the response rate of your interviews.
Why should organizations conduct exit interviews?
- Information to make changes
- Discuss obligations
- Get pointers to managers
- Peaceful resolutions
- References
Who Conducts Employee Exit Interviews
In a study involving 88 executives and 32 senior leaders from 210 organizations in 33 industries that were headquartered in more than 35 countries, Harvard Business Review researchers found that nearly three-quarters of the organizations conducted employee exit interviews.
According to the study, “Of those, 70.9% had their HR departments handle the process 19% had the departing employees direct supervisors do it 8.9% delegated the job to the direct supervisors manager, and 1% turned to external consultants.”
Further, they decided that the result of an exit interview should be actionable data. But, of the study participants reporting. only a third could identify a specific example of an action taken as a result of the exit interview data collection.
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Understanding What You Can And Cannot Control
Before we get into it, Id like to mention a thought that may already be ringing in your mind.
This thought is something along the lines of but we already consistently conduct structured exit interviews and rarely extract any actionable insight from them due to the employees lack of interest in sharing information.
That is a good point.
Some departing employees dont see any reason to be open and honest about their feelings, and that you cannot control. But you can address this issue by going all the way back to evaluating your onboarding process, and taking action to engage in candid conversations with current employees to make them feel comfortable with sharing their honest feelings.
However, that is a complex, separate topic of discussion altogether.
Too often EI programs fail to either improve retention or produce useful information. Weve identified two reasons why. The first is data quality. The usefulness of an EI depends utterly on the honesty and forthrightness of the departing employee.The second reason is a lack of consensus on best practices. The goals, strategies, and execution of EI programs vary widely, and the findings and recommendations from empirical studies are often vague or conflicting. But in our view, the deepest problem is that many organizations use EI programs as an excuse not to have meaningful retention conversations with current employees.Everett Spain, Making Exit Interviews Count
Communicating The Exit Survey
For staff to engage in the exit process the accessibility and benefits of the exit survey need to be consistently communicated to all staff. The easiest and most effective method for communicating this message with staff is though their direct managers. You need the support of your managers to attract staff participation in the exit interview process. Managers need to communicate with all staff that the opportunity to participate in an exit interview is open to them and need to reinforce that confidentiality assured.
In the absence of managers communicating the exit interview message, staff can still be encouraged to participate in an exit interview through information and key messages posted on the client organisations intranet or any other forum accessible staff.
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Exit Interviews: Best Practices To Gain Valuable Insight
Exit interviews why bother? Throughout my HR experience in companies of all sizes and in various industries, I have seen the benefits of conducting exit interviews. Its these interviews that provide an invaluable source of information on whats working and whats not working in the organization. The purpose of an exit interview is to shed light on areas requiring further attention to ultimately improve retention and engagement and in turn reduce turnover. However, exit interviews will only be a valuable resource if executed with proper care and for the right reasons.
The following 7 factors are pivotal best practices to gain the most value out of your exit interviews:
Aligning Questions To Engagement Measures Provides A Deeper Analysis
To get the most out of your exit interviews, make sure your questions are relevant and insightful. This requires a bit of creativity and a lot of trial and error. In my experience, when reviewing our exit interview processes and associated forms, Ive always asked Will these questions reveal powerful and actionable insights? Here are some ways Ive revamped our questions to garner more insightful and valuable feedback:
- Align questions to your core values. This will reveal whether you live and breathe your core values and which particular values are demonstrated regularly and which ones are lacking in day-to-day interactions.
- Add in questions related to your engagement survey measures. If youve completed a baseline engagement survey, use the exit interviews as a pulse-check to continually assess how youre doing on engagement measures. Is there improvement? Is it still seen as an opportunity to improve?
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Why Run An Exit Survey
While running an exit survey is a good way to get honest feedback from employees about their role, the real benefit and ROI of running an exit survey is ultimately to reduce unwanted employee attrition. A well-designed exit survey will allow you to understand the reasons people leave and allow you to identify changes that can be made to stop great employees from leaving. If you are able to tie your exit survey data to other points in the lifecycle or engagement survey data, it will allow you to identify where you can make the most impactful changes in the employee lifecycle to reduce potential turnover.
Can Exit Interview Information Help Improve Company Operations
When an employee chooses to leave your organization, it is often a time of disappointment. You wonder what went wrong with the hopeful candidate that your team put all their faith in. But this is nothing out of the ordinary just the ebb and flow of business.
As a company, using exit interviews can often reveal what went wrong and what the reasoning is behind your employees sudden exit. The information you receive from a former employee can be telling and may actually help your company improve its relationship with its workforce.
Eleven members of Forbes Human Resources Council shared how they ensure the information collected during an exit interview can betters an organization.
HR professionals weigh in.
All photos courtesy of Forbes Councils members.
1. Improve Employee Retention
Exit interviews provide practical information that can be used to improve controllable retention factors. Any company will be able to improve its employee retention if they use the feedback from exit interviews in a smart way. The raw data obtained from exit interviews can be entered in an Excel spreadsheet to create pivot tables, and then you just need to analyze any trends. – Angeles Escalante, Tyson
2. Align Interviews With Company Mission
3. Don’t Use Them In Isolation
4. Remember Every Opinion Is Valid
5. Combine With Stay Interviews
6. Link Exit Data To Organizational Strategy
7. Use Interviews To Identify Learning Objectives
8. Host Quarterly “New Trends” Meeting
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An Exit Interview Is Probably The Last Meaningful Conversation Youll Have With An Employee Before They Head Out The Door Heres How To Make Sure It Counts
HR is the conductor of all retention and employee engagement activities in a company, which means they are usually responsible for that most important of final impressions: the exit interview. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this process goes a long way to ensure your organisation changes and thrives far into the future.
Plus, turnover has a high cost specifically your time and energy thats going into new hiring. Its in everyones best interest to make each exit interview count.
Heres what you need to consider before you conduct your next exit interview:
Exit Interview Questions To Avoid
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Use Of Online Insyncs Exit Survey Portal Vs Phone Based Exit Interviews
All of our clients use our online Exit Survey portal but some also select phone based exit interviews. The portal has online survey functionality, allowing respondents to complete their exit interview privately from their own computer. Some of our clients also use Insync Surveys trained exit interviewers to conduct phone based exit interviews. While phone based exit interviews are more costly, they can increase response rates and they can enhance the depth of responses as the exit interviewer probes for further information. By having a third party conduct exit interviews over the phone, the departing employee is also often more candid. We then type verbatim comments collected in the exit interview into the clients portal, so everything is online and accessible to administrators.
Why Use An Exit Interview Platform Or Software
Online employee survey tools such as QuestionPro Workforce help HR managers connect effectively with the employees. This helps them gain information which they would otherwise not have or receive. Online survey platforms are being embraced by organizations globally to conduct workplace culture and employee experience surveys. Some of the benefits that online survey software offer are as below:
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Easy usability
The platform or software is extremely user-friendly, requires little to no training to start conducting surveys. It comes with an existing set of human resource templates you can use these and start conducting your studies. This ensures that you send surveys from day one of using the tool.
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Constant updates and customization
Organizations prefer using online survey tools as they come with a host of features and new features are frequently added. Not only that, but many of these tools can also be customized to meet the specific needs and requirements of organizations. You can customize your employee portal to reflect your brand themes and colors.
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Detailed analysis
These software are equipped with robust analytics that let you track and measure your organizations exit trends. You can use the tool to also track elements such as staff productivity, workforce engagement, employee morale, etc.
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Informed decision making
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Level Up Your Exit Interview Process
When employees dont rely on your organization for their livelihood, theyre more likely to provide honest and constructive feedback. Not everyone will speak forthrightly about an organization and its culture, but your best bet is usually with a worker who wont face any consequences for sharing his/her honest opinion.
In order to uncover valuable information through your exit interviews, you need to focus on two crucial factors: getting genuine answers to your questions and aggregating the data in an easy-to-interpret way. With exit interviews, businesses can unlock the reason behind unwanted attrition and identify troubles that prompt top performers to quit.
If your exit interviews are not as smooth as you want them to be, see how digitizing them can help in simplifying your employee offboarding process.
Tips For Exit Interviews And Surveys
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What Is Covered In This Blog:
While employee retention is the aim for most human resource departments, employee turnover is inevitable. According to research in March 2015, 2.8 million people voluntarily quit. This makes your employee termination protocol a key part of your employee career cycle. One way this can be supported is through is the use of exit interviews.
The University Of Limerick
The University of Limerick is situated on the west coast of Ireland has state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities. The university has been awarded prestigious 5-star rankings by QS Stars independent assessors. The rankings were for innovation and knowledge transfer, graduate employability, teaching, internationalization, and infrastructure.
The exit interview template used by them is very concise and clearly enquires about the reasons for leaving. It also seeks info about the job role and satisfaction, key elements for reducing attrition.
It is believed over 50% of all global organizations face difficulty retaining their highly-valued employees.
This brings us to the big question:
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The Exit Interview Process: How To Get It Right Every Time
When an employee has decided to part ways with your company, they are simultaneously opening a window of opportunity for you, as the employer, to gain valuable insight into why they have decided to move on, what went wrong , and what can be done in the workplace to improve retention and company culture.
Considering the disappointing nature of employee termination, many employers fail to recognize this opportunity, and wave goodbye to their former employees without learning anything.
Lets just get it done with and move on is a way of summarizing this attitude.
Furthermore, they fail to close the relationship on a positive note by showing the individual that they care about listening to their thoughts, and taking action to improve employee morale in the future.
This is a grave mistake, because not only are you missing valuable, actionable insights which will help you attract and retain top talent, but you are also leaving a trail of disappointed, perhaps bitter former employees that can damage your reputation amongst job seekers.
Not to mention, employee turnover is expensive, and failing to take preventative measures is nothing short of shooting yourself in the foot, financially as well as in terms of your brand reputation.
And so, conducting a structured exit interview with a departing employee is an incredibly important, often overlooked part of the offboarding process.
In this Process Street post, were going to be looking at:
How Do I Fill Out An Exit Interview Form
Top 10 Exit Interview Questions With Answers
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Things Your Exit Interviews Aren’t Telling You
Dan Hoppen
Exit interviews are standard protocol in most corporate workplaces. Though the reasoning for them is sound, most organizations attempts at exit interviews are fruitless. Organizations are leaving valuable information about how to improve the workplace and better retain employees on the table.
Don’t be one of those companies. We have five things you’re likely not learning from your exit interviews, then we offer five tips to fully leverage these processes to gain valuable insights of outgoing employees and their colleagues to consider for future exit interviews.