An exit interview is a debrief with an employee who has decided to terminate their employment. Asking the right questions can yield valuable results for your organisation. It’s a great tool to do a “health check” on your organisational culture.
Let’s look at the numerous ways in which exit interviews can be beneficial to your business:
Identifying Strengths
It helps you identify your company’s strengths from the employee’s perspective. It’s good to know what makes employees join and stay at a company. Equipped with this information you can choose to incorporate it into your branding strategy or use it to sell your company to prospective employees.
Identifying Weaknesses
It also helps you identify areas for improvement. It is important to identify issues that are driving your employees to leave. If you are losing good staff because of poor management, this is a matter worth addressing.
Benchmarking
Employees often take up employment with direct competition. The exit interview can be used to gather information regarding what your competitors offer in terms of salary, benefits, and perks. Regularly conducting exit interviews will also flag if another company is specifically targeting your workforce.
Innovative Improvements
Exit interviews are a good way to retrieve diverse and creative input on methods for improving your organisation. Employees who are leaving anyway might be more honest on ways in which your business can improve than existing employees who might ‘sugarcoat’ their feedback.
Insights
Asking the right questions during an exit interview will highlight any issues there might be in your recruitment, onboarding, and professional development processes. Taking action on trends identified will help you improve staff retention rates.
Creating Ambassadors
The exit interview is the final way in which you can transform an employee into an ambassador for your brand. You want employees to still recommend your product and/or services to others after they leave, or at least recommend your company as a great place to work.
It’s important to have a formal structure to your exit interviews. This will enable you to identify trends and take action to improve your organisation, whether it is a more effective job design, better working conditions, or improved team functioning.
Contact LeapfrogHR to help you with the design and execution of exit interviews.