An exit interview meaning is a conversation or feedback from an employee who separates from an organization. Mainly the exit interview is conducted by the HR team. It has become a crucial step and a general practice among companies as it helps in knowing the reasons behind employees’ leaving the organization, retaining them for the long run, and introspecting about the company’s culture while creating strategies for employee engagement.
Exit interviews can either be one-on-one with HR, form sent via mail or over the phone. Employees prefer the latter two options to one-on-one interviews as it helps employees express more, and it’s easier to open up on the phone or while filling the survey.
In this glossary of exit interviews, we will brief you about:
- Importance of exit interviews
- Exit interview questions
- Checklist make interviews count
- Tips for effective exit interviews
Importance of Exit Interviews
Exit interviews are necessary because of the following reasons:
- Departing employees can offer insights to create better and happier workplaces
- Opens the door to create a two-way positive image for future convenience, For instance- your organization will have better brand value, and the employer will be comfortable asking for recommendations
- Create or bring the pain points in front of you so that you can think upon them and work for the healthy work environment
- Retention rate might improve if exit interviews reveal common reasons for increasing attrition rates or if employees are leaving on a large scale
- Helps in budget and resource allocation to achieve goals as per the defined strategies
Top 6 Exit Interview Questions
If you are an HR in your organization or someone responsible to take exit interviews of employees who are leaving, then you must consider asking the following questions:
- Why are you leaving your current position? Or tell us the reasons behind your decision.
- What are the best and worst parts of our organization? Do you think you were equipped adequately?
- How were your relationships with your manager, team members, and other colleagues?
- What’s the most important reason to leave your current position?
- Tell us briefly about your roles and responsibilities. Hope you were not under any pressure or workload.
- What skills have you gained in our organization, and how will they help in your upcoming years?
Along with the mentioned questions, you can add them as per your choice. These questions will help you increase the retention rates and help in building better strategies, managing colleagues interactively, and gaining a three-dimensional view of your workplace.
How to make exit interviews count?
Exit interviews’ purpose won’t be solved without :
- Data Quality: Make sure employees who are leaving must share their honest feedback. Make them feel comfortable and lift up the pressure, if any, so that they can share their heart out
- Strategy conversion: Make sure feedback shared in exit interviews must be discussed later with concerned HRs, managers, and other authorities so that relevant changes can take place
- Sense of understanding: Make sure the group taking exit interviews can understand the employees’ emotions, reasons, and expressions and imprint the positive brand’s image
- Timing: Make sure the timing of exit interviews is not somewhere between processes when the employee is in the hassle or in the state of completing documentation and other processes
- Method: Make sure exit interviews must be appropriately structured, suited for one-on-one conversation, and help to give actionable insights for the organization
Exit interviews must assure that employers receive feedbacks for better training methods, management styles, workflows, work culture, team building activities or employee engagement activities, company policies, vision, and missions.
Top 5 Tips for Effective Employee Exit Interviews
If exit interviews are not effective, then the whole purpose of conducting them will be ruined. The effectiveness of these interviews can be managed by taking care of the following points:
- Organize interviews as per the convenience of employees that can be face to face, telephonic, or the means employees are comfortable in.
- Create a rough script of constructive dialogues in your mind for an effective two-way conversation.
- Ensure confidentiality of the opinions and expressions shared by the employees so that they can be honest and offer constructive feedback.
- Prepare a set of genuine questions so that employees can indirectly contribute to actionable insights.
- Analyze feedback given in exit interviews and try looking up into issues raised by exiting interviews.