Exit Interviews are one of the most powerful tools available at any organization’s disposal to help influence employee retention. But in many organizations, they turn out to be an HR relic, purely done as a formality with little to no possible outcomes to show for it. A recent survey conducted by HBR on the same found that around two-thirds of the surveyed companies did not feel like Exit Interviews had any material impact on the organization.
The major reason that could be attributed to the lack of impact is the lack of definition of goals. While setting up the process of Exit Interviews, companies should define what they want to achieve through this process of exit interviews. While the commonly associated goals include understanding patterns in employee attrition and unearthing any systemic problems that could be fixed, goals could also extend to understanding the market and competitors and even retaining employees.
Another key reason for the lack of its effectiveness is the lack of follow-up. All a perfectly designed exit interview process could do is bring some interesting insights. But actioning these insights is up to the companies and only when actioned can these insights become impactful. Since most exit interviews are conducted in an unstructured way, even these insights stay in the heads of a select few and die down eventually as they exit the company.
The last key factor is the ownership of the process. In a majority of companies, Exit Interviews are purely the ownership of the HR department. This limits the options for how the exit interviews could be conducted and reduce their effectiveness. It should be the ownership of all teams (at least the managers), the leadership team and the HR department where the HR department merely owns the process of facilitating the process while the respective team managers or org leaders own the metrics and the improvement of those said metrics.
After having addressed the common pitfalls of designing an exit interview process, there are still so many other design variables that you will have to decide upon. Who has to conduct the interview, when do I conduct the interview, should it be structured or unstructured, in what format should the interview be conducted and so on. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here but more often than not a balanced approach that has a bit of all works well. Unstructured interviews conducted by HR or skip-level managers coupled with a structured anonymous interview conducted way before the actual departure of the employee (so that he has not completely disengaged from the company) is a pretty good spot for companies to start off with and optimize from thereon.