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Everyone’s always talking about the usefulness of exit interviews. However, making good use of the data collected from them can be challenging. If someone resigns and provides valuable feedback during her exit interview, it’s not appropriate to send that right back to her manager. It’s also not appropriate to view it is a trend, unless you have more data to study. However, if you have data from multiple exit interviews you are sitting on a gold mine. You have people with firsthand experience of your agency, with very little to gain or lose, giving you insight into your blindspots. Don’t let the notes from these interviews sit in a filing cabinet! Instead, consider implementing these 3 ideas into your exit interview analysis.
- Have a 3rd party study and aggregate the data. This can be either a representative from HR—perhaps she is the one conducted the interview anyway—or an external evaluator. It’s also important to make sure the forms are made anonymous. Even if the representative from HR knows who said what, taking the names off of the forms for data collection and interpretation will help to remove any subconscious bias.
- Choose a timeframe from which you will group the responses. For instance, if only a few people are leaving each year, it probably makes sense to study all interviews from one year. However, if there is an exodus, or turnover is just routinely high, then studying them seasonally or even monthly may be more appropriate. You want enough data so that there is not just one or two interviews. However, you also want to learn from the data quickly. It’s a balance.
- Deliver it back to management in thoughtful and relevant ways. If your company is large, with several managers running a department, perhaps you aggregate responses from all the employees who have departed from that department. If your company is small, it may make sense to study all the interviews together and share the aggregated results with the entire management team. Again, this one depends on how you can balance the specificity of getting feedback to the appropriate manager, without losing the anonymity of the interviewees. The way you deliver the results to managers should also be considered. Finally, remember that whatever you choose, you should be transparent about the process with the interviewees. So when developing your agency’s practice, consider how your delivery of results to managers will affect a person’s comfort in being honest in her interview.
How do you make use of the data from exit interviews? Share with us in the comments below.