Your employee decided to quit and sent you the resignation letter, now what?!
Would you have a discussion with him to know what made him to take this decision or will you wait for the manager to approve his resignation so that you can send him the exit interview forms?
Well, I have seen, most of the time HR conducts exit interviews as just a way to check the box and don’t even try to have an actual conversation with the employee unless he is a top performer who you don’t want to quit.
Now even if you plan to have a conversation with him, an employee won’t open up to you fearing you would delay their exit and even final settlement processes.
Exit interviews aren’t cool and easy to do to. But there are a few things which you might do wrong that can even hurt your engaged workforce.
Not soliciting their feedback
Not listening to departing employee’s feedback can even hurt your other workforce. Know that your employees have their own network within the organization who often be their close work friends or colleagues. When you don’t solicit their feedback on why they want to quit, it shows that you don’t even care to know what makes your employees want to stay! Which makes them even question their continuity in the organization.
Using it as an engagement tool
Your employees might have already made up their mind to quit due to various factors which can or can’t be influenced. So using exit interviews as an engagement tool is of no use. But make sure you know what makes them leave your organization. And do something to make the situation better before your employees ever think to quit.
Not finding the real reason for their resignation
This can be a bit tough. Most often employees would give a general reason and hesitate to share the real underlying factor. Can it be a bad relationship with the manager, not getting enough recognition or even feeling discriminated? Then that could even effect your other workforce as well. So, now who should conduct the exit interviews- not the manager since he could be the reason. It can be HR and if your’s is a bigger organization, I would suggest to use a third party to do this. This will make your employees share the reasons without any fear.
Not giving enough time to respond
Hurrying up to finish the exit interview process won’t yield you any results. You may never know the situation your employee would be going through. He might be in the process of thinking and would need enough time to respond to your exit interview questions. This will help you get a more accurate information than when one respond hastily.
Not keeping it confidential
Most often employees don’t even share their feedback fearing that they would loss a future references from the organization or potential backlash from his manager. So inform them of the level of confidentiality that you intend to keep. Like for e.g. comments will not be shared with others or so. This will make them open up to you.
