Most companies will go on record (it might be lip service in some cases, yes) that they want to attract the best/brightest and then retain them. But oftentimes they don’t retain them -- 41% of global full-time employees are expected to search for, or change to, new jobs this year.
If your strategy is “retain the best” but then you don’t, how can you figure out why you’re not retaining them?
There would be two answers I’d assume most would giv
- “They left because of money.”
- “We don’t have a strategy for that. Good riddance. We have targets of our own to remain focused on.”
Both are unacceptable answers, especially if exit interviews are utilized properly.
The value of exit interviews
This should probably be clear, although they can have a lot of value in determining where your organization’s pain points are.
An exit interview, by definition, is with a person who just worked with you for an amount of time -- that might be three months or six years. Regardless, they worked with you and chose to leave. (Normally those fired are not given exit interviews, but rather escorted from the building.) We know from research -- from Dale Carnegie and others -- that most people leave jobs for two main reasons. You can probably guess, but here we go:
- Poor management
- Opportunity to make more money elsewhere
- Remember those. They will come back in a second.
But if someone worked for you for several years and chose to leave, they have a ton of institutional knowledge and context around what you do and how you do it -- and maybe even how it could be done better. Examples might include:
- Your policies
- Your processes
- How you train people
- How you train managers
- Communication
- Customer service
- Core products and services
- People “living the mission”
- Etc.
If you used exit interviews strategically, you could get reams of information on what your company is doing well and doing poorly. Then you could level-set on some of those items in the “poorly” category. After all, if retention is a tracked metric, then shouldn’t we be talking to those who decided to leave about why they decided to leave?
… but then there’s the psychology of the exit interview
What do I mean by that? Well, consider a few situations:
Let’s say the person is leaving because of their manager: That relationship has probably been contentious for a long time. Once the employee got a new job, which was probably a lengthy process, he/she needed to put in two weeks. So by the time the exit interview could occur, there’s a lot of frayed bonds between employee and manager. Even if the employee makes amazingly worthwhile points in his/her exit interview, a defensive manager will simply go to HR and say “Disregard all that; he/she was a problem employee anyway.” In such a situation, the exit interview becomes meaningless, so much so that PeopleResults (a HR blog) called exit interviews “the No. 1 most worthless HR activity.”
In-group vs. out-group: That’s an extremely powerful psychological concept that governs a lot of our lives. (Look at politics, or silos in companies.) Well, if someone is leaving your company, they are now out-group, even if on the day of the exit interview they are still technically in-group. So again, even if they make great points, a HR rep/manager may not listen, opting instead to think “What does this person know? They left this great place…” We want to believe this doesn’t happen and that people are always rational about work and advice, but unfortunately that’s not always the case.
The data issue: This is less psychology, but in a well-cited paper by Kenneth Teel (a HR professor at Cal-Long Beach) and Pamela Garretson (a systems analyst at Hughes Aircraft Company), they make two central arguments:
- Exit interviews can be a powerful tool for companies, but too often the results simply go in a personnel file and are never discussed again.
- Even when turnover is high and exit interviews could be used as a way to figure out what’s happening “on the ground,” too often no one is tasked with estimating the cost of turnover -- instead many say “it’s high” without attaching real data to it.
No. 1 is logical in that many companies value process more than actual quality of output, so interviewing someone, getting insights, and sticking those in a drawer seems like a reasonable thing that could happen. (Unfortunately.)
No. 2 is a problem, though. If companies truly want to compete in an age of data -- which some have called “the new oil” -- then they need to attach data to key metrics. You need to know how much it costs for an SVP to turn over vs. a product manager. This allows for better decision-making.
How do we make the exit interview better?
Stay tuned. We’ll get to that next time!