How To Master Exit Interviews With The Best Practices

No matter what, all organizations have their best employees who leave at some point.

Leaving employees can have many reasons. Those can be – career perspective, financial growth, work environment, bad experience, work-life balance, etc. So, to learn why employees leave, we use a process called exit analysis. Where we talk to them, ask about their experiences, and find out the reasons why they are leaving.

There are companies that aren’t paying attention, leading to profound losses to the organization. Whereas organizations with a proper exit process always get some beneficial information that helps the organization to grow in the long run.

When an employee leaves, the human resource department has to perform some activities. And an exit interview is one of the vital parts. Let’s discuss all the things in detail.

What is an exit interview?

An exit interview is a part of the exit process. The leaving employee and HR officer have a one-on-one meeting to be on the same page before the employee leaves. The human resource officer tries to take a few critical feedback about the work environment, employees’ behavior with each other, office policy, etc., from the leaving employee.

There is a precisely defined form or a set of questionnaires, which employees ought to answer. This information is quite significant for the organization. Because at times, you may not know if employees are facing some problems, this process assists you in getting startling knowledge. With the help of such feedback, you can take action and resolve them if there are some issues.

How to conduct the exit interview – Some best practices

Every organization has its way of taking exit interviews. There can’t be a specific way that can suit all the organizations. But here, we are trying to curate a standard procedure, which can be applicable to almost all organizations. Let’s have a look at them,

1. An experienced person should take the exit interview, which is unbiased and has sufficient knowledge about office policies. A person who can reach the actual root cause of the employee’s exit.
2. You should perform an exit interview with proper preparations. Abruptly taken interviews might not give you the desired result.
3. Do a survey that is relevant to your business and employee’s role. Ensure the survey is easy to fill out so that employees can fill the entire survey and not leave it incomplete.
4. The exit interview should ideally be taken on the employee’s last working day, and you should inform them in advance about the time of the interview.
5. When the employee is sharing his opinion with you, listen carefully. If you will not pay attention or if you wouldn’t be interested in knowing his side, there are chances you will miss some critical information.
6. Make sure the employee is comfortable sharing the information with management. Take his approval before you share the information with the management or high authorities.
7. If any employee is leaving due to some personal reason, then respect his decision. If the reason for leaving the organization is physical abuse, do not hesitate to take action against the culprit and assure the complete privacy to the leaving employee.
8. Your questions can be the same with every leaving employee but ask them differently according to the level of employee sitting in front of you.

Above mentioned points are a few general steps that all big and small organizations can follow.

A few productive and adequate questions

Being an organization, you can construct the questionnaire as per your business needs. Here we are mentioning some general questions that can help you find a few basic information.

• Reason for leaving the organization.

• Experience working with your organization.
• What improvements are required in working culture?
• Feedback about reporting manager.
• Relation with other employees.
• Favorite thing about working with the organization.
• Any memorable time with the organization. Etc.

There can be infinite possibilities of constructing questions to ask. It is on you how you create a survey and what you want to know.

Practices to evade during an exit interview

Try to avoid below mentioned things below when you take an exit interview.

1. Never ask for specific information about any particular employee. That can ruin your image in the employee’s mind.
2. An exit interview is a formal and profound part of the exit process. Do not indulge yourself in informal chatting; instead, make the session eloquent and fruitful to the employee and organization.
3. Do not make the employee uncomfortable during the process. Because if he is not comfortable, he will hesitate to open up and share his opinions with you. Also, give importance to his point of view without giving your suggestions.
4. Try not to make the exit process tough for leaving employee because maintaining mutual relations can benefit both employee and organization.

Using employee feedback efficiently

You get considerable insights during an exit interview. After completing the interview, do not keep the information unused in records; instead, take help from the survey outcome and make needed improvements.

• Discuss the feedback with relevant departments. If feedback is positive, it can be morale-boosting for the entire department and if you’ve received negative feedback, consider taking action for improvements and better growth of everyone.
• Do proper documentation and make it handy to use it every now and then. You can take references from the information for future endeavors as well.
• When you have more than one feedback aggregated at one place, you can find the exit trend. This is very important for the overall development of the organization.

So, this is how we take exit interviews using best practices. An exit interview is a crucial factor in the exit process. As we mentioned above, organizations should not overlook this process. It is as essential as any other process in the company.

When an employee is working in an organization, he might not discuss any negative points with you openly, but at the time of his leaving, you will get pieces of information that might surprise you. So, if your vision is making your organization a happy place to work and if you want to survive in the business for the long run, then an exit interview is a must. The goal is to improve your organization in such a way, that employees feel motivated and enjoy working for you.

For exit interview surveys and other employee surveys, QaizenX is there to help you.

Get in touch with us.