The exit interview process is much like most organization’s employee referral process.
You believe you should have a process. You design the process. It’s going to be great! It starts out great. At some point, soon after starting the process, it dies a slow horrible death!
Exit interviews are something every HR pro believes are important, but very few actually do a great job at. The problem with most exit interview processes is that they are very HR dependent and take a ton of follow through.
Another major problem is that while our executives say they want the data from the interviews, rarely do they believe what they are given. Most chalk up bad exit interviews to disgruntled employees and discount the entire process.
So, why do we give Exit Interviews? I’ll give you three “real” reasons HR wants to do exit interviews:
Chalk this up to data that our executives say they want, but they really don’t!
What they want to hear is that the problem behind why our people are leaving us are easy fixes. When they find out they’re leaving because of their bad leadership, every person who fills out an exit interview immediately becomes a piece of garbage in their eyes.
How do you fix this?
Do you ever deliver specific exit interview data immediately after one person leaves that seems similar to why another person leaves? Basically, you never get credit for that being real data. Exit interview data only becomes “real” when it’s based on many data points put together. The problem with that is it takes most organizations a while to get that much data, and usually at that point, it starts to become vanilla.
Individual exit interview feedback can be powerful, but only if it is coming from a top player and you can get everyone involved to agree this is a top performer before the data comes in. At least at that point, you have a fighting chance to get top management to listen and not discount the feedback.
Let’s face it — we all know most of our issues. We just hate it when our past employees throw those in our face when we think we’ve been working hard to correct them. That kind of feedback is hard to accept, and we tend to discredit it way too fast.
Don’t allow yourself to believe data isn’t statistically significant unless you have a lot of it. One great employee leaving is significant, and you need to listen to why. Just know the uphill battle you’ll face in actually creating the leadership change necessary to address it.
This was originally published on The Tim Sackett Project.
