Want your exit interviews to have greater meaning? Implement stay interviews to run alongside them

High turnover for any organisation can be damaging and ultimately cost your company dearly. Not only in terms of financial impact but also the effect it can have on your organisation’s culture, employee engagement and productivity.

If you wait to find out why employees are leaving as part of an exit interview process, or treat this as a purely tick box exercise, you are neglecting valuable information that could avoid a lot of headaches for everyone involved. All too often, organisations carry out exit interviews without analysing the information being provided to them, or they fail to take action on potential issues that may be identified, resulting in a never-ending cycle of recruitment.

At the point of resignation, your employee has become emotionally disconnected from your organisation and they may not even provide you with any meaningful feedback that could bring about true change.

The goal for any exit interview process is for the organisation is to understand what went wrong and how that employee could have been retained (unless they were a poor performing employee of course!). However, instead of waiting for an employee’s resignation to hit the HR inbox, you may want to consider implementing stay interviews at crucial moments of your employee’s onboarding journey and throughout their career with your organisation.

Find out about your new team member, ask for feedback on their recruitment and onboarding experience early on, make them feel valued and discuss career goals. If enough data is captured early enough, you can create customised learning pathways and development plans that will keep their engagement high.

When was the last time you checked in with your most successful employees to find out how they are doing, whether they are happy at work or what your organisation could do better for them? In a chaotic world, continuing to navigate through Covid, do you know what they value most? What they need right now versus longer term? Your stay interviews do not have to be too structured – a morning coffee meeting, an online check in, a team feedback session.

If you are considering introducing stay interviews, keep things simple, ask three questions, for example:

1. Do you get recognition for the work you do?

2. Are you treated with trust and respect?

3. What situations have made you think about leaving the organisation?

Carefully consider what questions to ask your top performing employees – align these to information you may already know (or suspect you know) about your organisation’s culture, leadership, communication, etc.

Stay interviews (or even pulse surveys) can be a useful way of understanding why your employees are remaining at your organisation – which is something you can use as part of your recruitment process to show why candidates should want to work with you.

Or it may be that through a thorough analysis of the information gleaned from both exit interview data as well as stay interviews, you can understand what improvements you need to implement in your organisation that will make a difference to them staying or leaving.

It’s worthwhile noting that it’s important to take action or provide feedback quickly to ensure your team members can see a direct correlation between their opinion and change.

Regardless of whether you use exit or stay interviews (or ideally a combination of both), failing to respond and take action on employee feedback can only result in continued unhappiness and high turnover.

Why not talk to us and learn how we can proactively source candidates that match your organisation’s values and culture - our aim is to help you build incredible businesses, and that includes trying to eliminate the stress from continually hiring the wrong candidates.