Employees may be more willing to share insights they have not shared before their departure when they leave your company. These insights might include frustrating business processes, a lack of tools or resources to get the job done, or managers or others who may negatively impact the workplace.
Here are our top tips for conducting employee exit interviews:
1. Ask the employee to participate and an exit interview via phone a couple days after their last day. This allows employees to reflect on their experiences outside of the work environment. This helps to moderate their experience and gives them a little bit more courage to share.
2. All exit interviews should be handled by your HR department. Ideally, this would be the initial person who recruited them or was involved in their hiring process. by having their recruiter handle the exit interview, those initial conversations about the ideal work environment can be reflected upon in the exit interview. And it serves as a way for the recruiter to learn key insights into the company and its hiring practices.
3. Start the conversation with small talk and express a genuine interest in the employee as they move on from your workplace. Have a set list of questions you ask everyone, and let the employee know that they don’t have to answer every question. They are free to skip or move on from any questions they are uncomfortable answering.
4. Questions you’ll want to include in your exit interview are:
a. What was the reason(s) you decided to leave the company at this time?
b. If for another position, what made this new position more attractive than your position with the company?
c. Is there anything the company could have done differently that would have made this new opportunity less attractive?
d. Since joining the company, what accomplishment makes you the proudest?
e. Did you have all the tools and resources needed to do your job? If not, what could have helped you be more successful.
f. What is the company doing particularly well?
g. What is the company doing particularly poorly?
h. How could the company improve its operations?
i. What advice would you give your manager or company leadership that would help them change the work environment to provide a better place to work?
j. If given the opportunity to return to the company, would you do so?
k. Would you recommend the company to your family and friends?
5. Now that you have this feedback, what do you do with it? Key points discovered from exit interviews should be summarized and shared with leadership, typically a level above the employee’s direct manager. These outgoing employees may not have the company’s best interests in mind when providing feedback and may be ready to throw others “under the bus” to make themselves feel or look better. Any accusations of harassment should be investigated by HR.
6. Before making changes based on an employee’s feedback, you may want to survey a few other employees and ask, “would the situation be improved if a change was made?” This will help to validate the feedback and the proposed solution without saying where the concern originated.
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