When an employee decides to leave an organization, HR manager needs to make everything possible to understand their reasons for such a decision. It is crucially important to clarify what exactly makes people quit their jobs and move to other companies. This may help to define problems that currently exist in the organization, find the drawbacks in the work of leadership, and find out reasons for why the employees lose their motivation.
What Is an Exit Interview?
An exit interview is an interview, survey, or just a talk conducted with a person when they leave an organization or an association. This kind of interview is not obligatory (unlike the interview to get a job offer) but it may be used to solve multiple problems. If you really care about your team and people who work with you, exit interviews should become your obligatory practice.
Why Conduct Exit Interview
Now let us talk about the most common reasons for conducting such kind of an interview. Perhaps, some of the reasons will make your experience in working with the team better and explain the problems with your employees.
1) Exit Interview Helps Understand Why Exactly a Person Quits Their Job
The first reason for such an interview is to understand why exactly a certain person leaves their position. The reasons may be different and you need to understand whether it is a fault of the organization or leadership or maybe there are some external problems. Perhaps, a person was headhunted by another organization where they were promised a better salary or wider field of responsibilities, or they cannot work under the pressure, or maybe they feel exhausted and just want to have a couple of months of rest.
2) You Get Feedback
Most of the employees do not give truthful feedback while they work in a certain organization. People who decided to quit have nothing to lose so they can tell you everything that they think. Of course, the feedback may be rather negative, especially if an employee leaves the company because of some problems, so you need to know how to deal with negative feedback and how to analyze it.
3) Employee Leaves an Organization on a Positive Note
Even though there might be some problems in a company which made an employee leave it, it is extremely important to make sure that they leave the organization on a positive note. The exit interview will help you with that: you will show a person that the company really cares about the reasons why people leave it.
4) You Check the Obligations
An exit interview is one of the best ways to check the obligations between an organization and an employee. First of all, you need to make sure that an employee has completed all the tasks. Next, you need to review the terms of their contract and NDA so that they remember their obligations before the company after leaving it. Also, you will check what are the company’s obligations before the employee.
5) You Will Know What Should Be Done in This Position in the Soonest Time
If you do not want to lose time till a new employee understands what they should do in his position, you’d better talk to the person who quits and get to know everything about their responsibilities and tasks that should be completed in their position. Perhaps, you should even ask them to provide some assistance to a new person to make sure that they do everything correctly.
6) You Define the Areas Where Your Company Has Problems
Make sure that you ask a question that gives you a chance to understand what areas of company activity require your attention. Perhaps, the employee is not satisfied with medical insurance or maybe you have problems with team communication. You may ask direct questions if a person is ready for such kind of a dialogue, or get this information by asking leading questions.
7) You Find New Ways to Optimize Employee Retention
You may always use this conversation to build a strategy to optimize employee retention. Ask questions that will give you an understanding of what should be done to make employees stay in your company.
8) You Check the Organization Aspects
Another important question that you should ask is whether there are any problems with work organization at different levels of the company. Maybe there are some problems in the team or perhaps there are problems with an organization at the top management level.
Conclusion
Some HR managers and leadership representatives avoid conducting exit interviews as they are afraid to hear some unpleasant truths about their work. However, such conversations can help you with building a proper strategy and making your company a perfect place for working. If you want to reach better results, you need to learn how to make use of exit interviews and we hope that these 8 tips will give you the idea of your own strategy!
