Should exit interviews be shown the door?

Exit interviews are often criticised because they occur too late to prevent employees from leaving and may be just a box-ticking exercise. So, are they worth doing?

The primary purpose of the exit interview is to understand why your employee is leaving and what improvements can be made to either the role or your business.

The person conducting the interview needs to be aware of key barriers they may face when it comes to gaining this information from the departing employee.

Reading between the lines

By definition, an exit interview only occurs after an employee has already decided to resign and has made other plans, such as accepting another job offer.

Scenarios to be prepared for include:

• An employee about to start a new career or job may be unsure about whether they have made the right decision, or may want to protect their position in case the change doesn’t work out. This may affect the information they provide in their exit interview, limiting any valuable insight your business receives
• The interview may also be conducted at a time when an employee feels vulnerable and therefore prone to giving cautious, rather than truthful, answers
• The employee may provide safe and possibly evasive answers to exit interview questions and be hesitant to criticise organisation policies or individual managers, even though they contributed substantially to the decision to resign
• The employee may feel their responses in an exit interview will be taken into account in the reference they are given by their manager
• Highly skilled exit interviewers may need to read between the lines, look for evidence and identify the real reasons an employee is resigning.

What can exit interviews actually achieve?

Exit interviews provide value to a business if both the interviewer and employee prepare for them. The interviewer should have appropriate interviewing skills and experience, and the interview should take place in a non-threatening environment.

The interviewer should remember the employee is doing the organisation a favour by attending an exit interview. They are giving up their time and are agreeing to take part in an exercise that may be stressful and confronting for some.

A well-conducted exit interview can achieve the following:

• Verify the job description and specifications – the job may have changed substantially during the employee’s tenure and up-to-date information may assist in recruiting a replacement employee
• Identify problems within the organisation – such as management style, communication, discrimination, bullying, access to opportunities, career development, remuneration and benefits, working hours, workload, recruitment policy, training, job design, and other HR issues
• Obtain suggestions for improvements to organisation policies and practices
• Allow employees to express their criticisms on-site rather than leave and go public with their concerns, such as on social media
• Alert the employer to fraudulent or unethical activities, such as theft or bullying.

There are fewer benefits for employees, but exit interviews do give departing employees the opportunity to get things off their chest and potentially leave on better terms than might otherwise be the case.

Employees may also feel that if they are able to say something constructive, this may lead to improvements that benefit their work colleagues who remain.

Are retention interviews a better option?

Some organisations have supplemented or replaced exit interviews with a more proactive approach. Instead of asking employees who have already resigned why they are leaving, they approach long-serving employees, whom they value highly, and ask why they have stayed.

This approach, sometimes called a “retention interview”, has the following advantages:

• It can identify the features of the organisation that good employees value highly. This information can be emphasised to attract other high-quality employees and discourage existing ones from leaving
• If problems are brewing within the organisation, it provides a chance to identify and remedy them before employees start resigning
• It can be done cheaply, informally and unobtrusively.

How to conduct a retention interview

While it would be possible to arrange a formal, structured retention interview, many organisations conduct them less formally in the following ways:

• Extra questions asked during occasional one-on-one catch-up discussions between employees and their immediate managers
• Separate one-on-one discussions that cover this topic only
• Focus groups involving several employees at once, with discussion facilitated by a senior manager, HR professional or external consultant
• Survey questions either as a separate questionnaire or as part of an engagement survey.

QSuper can help

Being an employer of choice means supporting employees both when they join your business or workplace, and also when they make the decision to move on.

QSuper’s changing jobs resource can easily be included in your exit process. This can be provided to a departing employee, either in hardcopy or in a digital format, which can be attached to an email.

To request printed copies, give our Employer Support team a call on 1300 367 845.

If you'd like to know more about delivering a smooth exit process for an employee, read our News Hub article on 'Tips for the employee exit process'.

The opinions expressed and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the QSuper Board. No responsibility is taken for the accuracy of any of the information supplied and you should seek advice for your circumstances.