Article: Exit Interview: An opportunity to decipher the organization

Culture

Exit Interview: An opportunity to decipher the organization

Since exit interviews are a good way to gauge the emotions of a leaving employee, it becomes important to conduct them carefully to get frank and honest feedback.
Exit Interview: An opportunity to decipher the organization

Retaining and gaining right kind of talent is the foremost requisite of any organization. An effective Human Resource Planning (HRP) is incomplete without undertaking effectual forecasting about manpower demand and manpower utilization study. For undertaking all these studies one of the important tool is Exit Interviews. This is both a qualitative and quantitative tool, practical and quiet inexpensive in nature.

Since exit interviews are a good way to gauge the emotions of a leaving employee, it becomes important to conduct them carefully to get frank and honest feedback. Nowadays almost all the organizations in every sector, both public and private, conduct exit interviews to assess and improve all aspects of working environment, culture, policies and practices in organization. Most of the employee retention, training and development programs are formulated from this component. 

An exit interview is helpful in obtaining an understanding of the positive and negative aspects of employment within your organization. Therefore, it is important to take care of following things while conducting the exit interviews:

  • While conducting exit interviews it is important to give empathetic listening and patience and should be open to every criticism. 
  • It is important to explain the purpose of exit interviews to the departing employees, for their honest feedback. Exit interviews should not be taken by immediate supervisor.
  • The whole process should be kept simple, and to be conducted confidentially and privately.
  • Interviewer should be skilful, well trained and non-judgemental, and should be sensitive for “personal reasons” because of which employee is leaving the organization.
  • At the end of interviews, always say “thanks” with a positive smile and then tabulate all the accumulated information to be used for improvements.

The grass is not always greener, at times during exit interviews due to lack of trust, even when assurances of anonymity and confidentiality are provided, some employees do not verbalize their dissatisfaction and prefer maintaining their demeanour. At times, due to resource and time constraint or because of multiple locations, it is impossible to conduct one to one interviews, as it becomes a costly affair. Lack of uniformity in questions due to personal bias or unable to recognize the non-verbal cues ultimately rescinds the real essence of exit interviews.

People often confuse exit interviews as a way to stop the employees leaving the organization, by addressing to their grievances or problems. However, it is just a part of separation stage of employee life cycle. It gives a prospect to both off-boarding employee and employer to properly close the existing relationship and not to leave any loose ends which can effect both of them.

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Topics: Culture

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