Having staff members leave can be tough on your business. And while it can be hard getting to the bottom of an employee’s reason for leaving, a proper exit interview can help you improve the experience of current and future employees, and ultimately reduce staff turnover.
High staff turnover is bad for morale. It’s also bad for your business.
The cost of replacing an employee is around 2.5 times their salary; and the time spent replacing them can result in a substantial loss of performance and productivity.
Exit Interviews are a great way to find out why your employees are leaving.
Ask:
- What did they like about working for your company?
- What didn’t they like?
- Did they know and understand your company’s goals and direction?
- Did they know if your company was achieving these goals?
- Did they clearly understand their job goals and objectives?
- Did they feel valued by the company and their manager?
- Were their employee value expectations met?
Find out what’s working and not.
Taking the time to understand why each individual makes the decision to leave your business, will provide a good insight of what’s working and not working for your team. It will flag common complaints or issues. And highlight positive experiences.
What do you do with the feedback?
There’s no point doing an exit interview, if you don’t consider doing something with the feedback. If an issue is raised, consider is it fair feedback? Dig a bit deeper, and qualify feedback. What can be done to brick wall your remaining talent from leaving because of the same reason?
If an employee resigns, but hasn’t found another job yet, the exit interview will afford you the opportunity to understand why they are motivated to leave, and instigate changes that may encourage them to stay.
Exit interviews also give the exiting employee closure. The chance to share their successes, and what they liked about the job. Allow them to contribute to your company’s ongoing success by offering a suggestion on how you could improve on something.
The Selling Points
Positive feedback may contain key selling points of the job or your company, that you could use in your employment branding and job opportunity marketing.
If you can’t persuade your employee to stay, send them off in the right way; a brand ambassador, a means of referrals (like-minded people network together) and perhaps a future client or customer.
