Exit Interviews? Try This New Twist

By Dick Finnegan

Dick Finnegan, Founder, Finnegan Mackenzie Resources

For decades HR managers have been gathering exit data from leaving employees, either in person or by way of an automated system. Much data is collected but little is done with it to improve overall management performance. Why is this?

Word on the street is that exit surveys are the most popular of all retention strategies. Actually, the word comes from conference meeting rooms where we constantly poll HR managers on (1) Do you conduct exit surveys in some form? and (2) Do you improve your company as a result? Question 1 results in raised hands from 90% of the audience whereas that number reduces to about 10% after asking question 2.

The reason for this discrepancy is because employees quit jobs because they can. This is the first principle in the Rethinking Retention Model^sm and reflects the frustration of conducting exit interviews and spreading the resulting data to the management team. Exit interviews fail as a retention strategy even though the logic of using them is sound: If you find out why employees leave, you can patch those holes and remaining employees will stay.

The main difficulty is that employees often times don’t tell you why they are leaving. Their urge to escape without conflict leads to a new Mom saying she wants to stay home with her baby when she really just wants to distance herself from her supervisor. Or a high-performer who claims “better opportunity” when we fail to ask the critical follow-up question which is “Why did you look?”

Other factors further compromise the process. Many companies convert exit surveys into mini opinion surveys and ask for input on pay, benefits, and a list of other conditions that give the leaver additional options for skirting the truth. While asking these questions seems like a natural add-on, they clutter the process because all we care about is why did you leave. And some leave reasons that are typically included fail to lead to solutions, with the most common example being attendance. Anyone who chooses to miss work is telling us a leave reason we need to dig deeper to understand.

So what’s a company to do? Take the ideas above and make exit surveys better, even if only to capture whether a leaving employee has been harassed or has another reasonable gripe. But a better idea is to move the exit survey one level up by asking managers to interview their subordinate supervisors every time that supervisor loses an employee. Key questions would include Why did this employee leave? What could you have done differently? Who trained this employee? How was this employee’s performance? Did you have any reason to suspect this employee would leave? How did this employee work with her colleagues?

The first key to retention is supervisor accountability. Supervisors suddenly develop better retention skills when they know retention is important in the eyes of the boss. Setting retention goals and holding supervisors accountable changes the landscape from “I’m sorry you lost Joan” to “How did you lose Joan? We really needed her.” Supervisors leave these discussions asking themselves what steps they must take to retain the rest of their teams. Rarely do traditional exit surveys result in the same change of direction.

Now is the time to rethink retention strategies as many surveys tell us employees are gearing up to leave. Your turnover might go up as the economy improves and more jobs become available, but try this idea and you’ll retain more workers than you would by following the traditional path.

Dick Finnegan is the author of “Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad” and Founder of the Retention Institute. You can learn more about his work at www.RetentionInstitute.com including the only online employee retention certification program in which candidates can earn up to 26 HRCI re-certification credits 

3 Studies on Employee’s Post-Recession Intentions

• Deloitte warns companies to expect a “resume tsunami” as 49% are looking or plan to look as the economy improves (September, 2009)
• Right Management reports 60% plan to look as the economy improves (November, 2009)
• Execunet and Finnegan Mackenzie found more than 90% of executives would take a recruiter’s call and more than half are already looking (July, 2009)

Posted by Dick Finnegan on March 22, 2010. Filed under Retention, Thought Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry