Employee feedback is always useful to help leaders learn and improve. It particularly valuable when obtained from employees who are leaving. For the most part, employees who are departing on positive terms have no axe to grind and can be open and objective about their experiences.
A good exit interview process can help you to diagnose your strengths and areas for improvement as a leader, as well as give you insights into a range of issues that may be impacting on employee satisfaction or retention.
As well as providing you as a leader with useful feedback, an effective exit interview with a departing employee can help to identify information that is useful to remaining employees. Especially in sales or customer relationship management roles, departing employees may have insights that others in the team may lack.
Of course, there should be a handover process anyway, but the exit interview provides an additional one-on-one opportunity to pick up on any points that may have been overlooked. You cannot force the leaver to divulge their personal know-how but you have a better chance of finding it out by asking than if you never ask at all.
Structured exit interviews can:
- Enhance your understanding of how effective you are at leading others.
- Provide wider information that can help to improve the working environment within the organisation.
- Retain know-how that might otherwise be lost.
- Deliver insights on improving employee retention.
- Help you to find out what other organizations are offering to attract employees that you may not be doing.
- Create a lasting and positive impression on the departing employee.
Apart from asking general questions as to why they are leaving, and seeking to retain any know-how they might be willing to discuss, also ask specific questions such as:
- How well did your experience with us live up to promises made during the recruitment process?
- How well did you feel you were led during your time with us?
- How did the training and development opportunities provided to you live up to your expectations? Where were the gaps?
- How empowered did you feel working here?
- What aspects of how you were recognized for your work made you feel valued? What suggestions might you have to improve on this?
- How effective did you feel communication was within the team? Between teams? How do you think this might be improved?
- How would you describe the working conditions here generally?
- What could we have done to make you stay with us?
When an employee leaves on a high note, this might influence future career decisions they take and you may find some of them seeking to rejoin the organization at a later stage or recommending it to others, so in this sense the exit interview has a public relations component to it as well.