Employee Experience, Employee Listening, Retention Strategies
Don’t let departing employees leave without asking them for feedback. Exit interviews are a critical tool for improving the employee experience and reducing turnover.
At Great Place To Work®, we talk a lot about the importance of measuring the employee experience through regular pulse surveys and other feedback efforts. But there’s one group many employers neglect, whose input is just as valuable as your current workforce: employees who leave.
Exit interviews are a critical piece of the offboarding process. When conducted thoughtfully and strategically, they can help you to better understand the employee experience, identify organizational gaps, and reduce future turnover.
What are exit interviews and why are they important?
Exit interviews are a two-way conversation between an employer and an employee who has decided to leave the organization, with the goal of understanding that employee’s experience and their reasons for leaving. Interviews are typically arranged by HR but may include other leaders, depending on the situation.
While easy to dismiss (after all, shouldn’t you be focusing on your active employees?), exit interviews are crucial for both employees and organizations.
For employees, they provide a platform to express their experiences, concerns, and suggestions, ensuring they leave on a positive note. This process can offer a sense of closure and the opportunity to voice any unresolved issues.
For organizations, exit interviews offer valuable insights into the workplace culture, management practices, and reasons behind employee turnover. This feedback can help identify areas for improvement, enhance employee retention strategies, and ultimately create a more positive and productive work environment.
As an example, engineering and design firm Kimley-Horn — a Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For® since 2016 — uses exit interviews in addition to career check-ins and stay interviews to ensure they maintain pay equity.
Best practices for conducting effective exit interviews
Even though exit interviews are for departing employees, the same care and attention should be put into the interview process as you would put into soliciting feedback from active employees.
Prepare with purposeful questions
Don’t go into an exit interview without a plan. Otherwise, you might not get the insights you’re looking for and the employee may not get the closure they need.
Use a standardized set of questions to ensure consistency and comprehensiveness. By using the same base set of questions for each interview, you can then gather consistent data. Some base questions could be:
- What are your reasons for leaving?
- What were your experiences with leadership like?
- How would you describe your team’s dynamics?
A lot of exit interview questions may mirror statements in your employee engagement survey tool. You can then assess these comparable data points from both current and departed employees for a more robust picture of your workplace’s employee experience.
While you want to have a plan, you can also leave time for open-ended comments, so the employee can express anything not addressed in the questions. You can also ask clarifying questions, but don’t pry or force an issue.
Listen thoughtfully to their feedback. Allow the employee to speak freely without interruption or judgment.
Create a safe and comfortable environment
With exit interviews, confidentiality is the number one priority. Ensure that the employee knows any information they share during the exit interview will remain confidential. This encourages departing employees to be candid and honest.
Have a neutral party, such as an HR representative, conduct the interview — rather, than, say a manager who may be a reason behind the person’s departure — to ensure objectivity and increase the employee’s sense of psychological safety.
Whether you do the interview in person or virtually, make sure it’s face-to-face. This enables more trust to be built since both parties can read the other’s body language and spot other non-verbal cues.
Conduct the interview at the right time
Conduct the interview after the employee has formally resigned but before their last working day. This will enable a more open conversation, and the employee can share their thoughts while they are still fresh.
Also, be aware that the employee may be busy wrapping things up during their last weeks or may be worried about having a candid conversation on-site. Offer them flexibility, such as the option to do it virtually or earlier or later in the day when the workplace is quieter.
Key questions to ask during an exit interview
Your exit interview questions can be tailored to your organization, but ensure these general focus areas are covered.
Motivation for leaving
Ask the employee about their reasons for departure and if anything could have been done to retain them. These questions could look like:
- What prompted you to search for another opportunity?
- What could have been done to prevent your departure?
- What are you most excited about in your new role?
Work environment and culture
Inquire about the overall culture, leadership support, team dynamics, and communication within the organization. For example:
- How would you describe the company culture?
- Would you consider returning to this company in the future? Why or why not?
- What do you think we should know about your experience here?
Opportunities for growth and development
Explore whether the employee felt there were sufficient opportunities for career growth, professional development, and feedback. Questions could include:
- Do you feel your manager supported your success?
- Did you feel you had the necessary tools and resources to perform your job effectively?
- Did you receive sufficient feedback and in a way that supported you?
Job satisfaction and work-life balance
Finally, ask the employee about their satisfaction with job responsibilities, work-life balance, and any obstacles they faced that impacted their overall experience. Consider questions like:
- How were you supported to take care of your responsibilities at work and at home?
- How did our leaders model work-life balance/work-life integration?
- Were there any company policies or procedures that you found particularly helpful or problematic?
How to analyze and act on feedback from exit interviews
While no employer wants to see their employees leave, when they do, it can offer up a gold mine of information — provided you collect, assess, and act upon the data.
Look for trends and patterns
Once an exit interview is completed, input the feedback into a secure, confidential data bank. You can then use this to systematically analyze what employees have said and identify trends and areas for improvement.
For example, you may note that challenges with leadership or dissatisfaction with compensation and benefits repeatedly come up as reasons for employees leaving.
These patterns may echo similar sentiments you’ve seen in your employee engagement survey tool, but you may also spot a new issue to start measuring among your current employees.
Use data to drive change
Exit interview data can offer a lot of insights, which you can then use to inform decisions on leadership development, workplace culture improvements, and talent management.
And while you want to account for all feedback, pay special attention to themes and trends. These could be both strengths and opportunities.
For example, maybe departed employees say that while they had a collaborative team, they didn’t see any opportunities for growth beyond their current role. Or perhaps the compensation was great, but unrealistic deadlines were harming their work-life balance.
What insights can you use to improve your workplace experience?
Close the feedback loop
Crosscheck any themes you’ve identified within your current staff — both leaders and employees.
On the employee side, you want to retain the employees you have and address any pressing issues or low-hanging fruit with urgency and attention. If one employee left because of a specific issue within your organization, there’s a good chance others may feel the same way.
On the management side, by providing useful data to the leadership team, your organization can take actionable steps to address identified areas of improvement.
Train leaders to lead flexibly
Collecting employee feedback, both through exit interviews and pulse surveys, can — and should — lead to consistent changes and improvements in the workplace.
As such, leaders need to be flexible and adapt whenever new feedback leads to new initiatives.
Provide resources to help leaders navigate these changing expectations. This might include:
- Practical workshops on flexible leadership styles
- One-on-one coaching sessions
- Or guidelines for making fair decisions.
Encourage leaders to maintain regular check-ins and create environments where team members feel comfortable voicing concerns, so they're more likely to address issues before they become resignation reasons.
The impact of exit interviews on employee retention and organizational culture
Exit interviews are a vital tool for gathering actionable feedback from departing employees. When done right, they provide valuable insights into workplace culture, leadership effectiveness, and employee satisfaction.
A successful interview depends on key factors: thoughtful preparation, creating a safe environment for honest feedback, and timely follow-up actions based on the insights you’ve gathered.
Whether aiming to improve retention or enhance overall employee experience, the foundation remains the same — a culture of trust, transparency, and continuous improvement.
Want to gain a deeper understanding of your employees’ needs? Great Place To Work’s employee surveys can help you take the pulse of your organization, so you can take actionable steps to drive positive change before an employee leaves.
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