Why are My Employees Leaving? The Benefits of Exit Interviews conducted by a Third-Party
Updated: Nov 21, 2021
It is important to ask why your employees are leaving, to strengthen your employee brand, stay up to date on benefit and compensation packages, identify development opportunities, and get insight into management issues.
When it comes to conducting exit interviews, take into consideration that the best approach to finding out what is causing turnover is likely not to be directly asked by you, the organization. Organizations that implement an internal process for conducting exit interviews with employees that have already left see participation rates as low as 20%. You cannot exactly get a lot of meaningful data from those kinds of numbers.
Having a third party handle the exit interview process has several advantages – guaranteed confidentiality helping ensure you get honest results, resources available to collect feedback that proves truly actionable, and a much higher participation rate as well as a seamless process for your organization.
When a former employee is contacted by an internal member of staff, they may question the confidentiality of their feedback. Will the person receiving the feedback maintain confidentiality? Who internally will have access to the feedback if kept on record? When employees are not comfortable with the confidentiality, this can lead to inflated “tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear” answers to questions or an unwillingness to participate at all. A third-party can help overcome this bias since it can include interviewers who are unaffiliated with the former employer. When a former employee understands their feedback is being provided to a third party, they are not only more likely to participate, they are also instantly more comfortable being honest and candid with their feedback, resulting in a more accurate idea of issues that can be addressed within the organization.
With a third party focusing on the exit interviews, the process is much simpler and client satisfaction much higher because the resources are already in place. Email contact can also be easily and professionally coordinated and distributed as well as standard mail. A third party managing the process of acquiring a client’s former employee feedback can save a client a lot of time and headache trying to manage the necessary resources on your own.
Phone and online surveys are popular methods used by third-party interviewers. When a choice of more than one method is offered, excited employees will be more likely to provide feedback via their preferred method. Offering the ability to easily access a survey to complete online, including a computer or mobile device, is extremely convenient and a quick way to submit feedback. For some people, verbally answering questions over the phone is preferred. A third-party focused on obtaining feedback for a client is also dedicated to offering methods to bring in as much feedback as possible.
Finding out why your employees are leaving through an internal exit interview process may seem like a simple and straight forward process, but taking into consideration all the questions that need to be answered, processes that must be in place, procedures that ought to be reviewed, and how to compile and analyze the feedback in a meaningful way for your organization, it quickly goes from simple and easy to a huge undertaking. Using a third party dedicated to client satisfaction and obtaining results that allow you to act.
Taryn M Consulting is here to help your organization obtain high-quality feedback that leads to action that increases your retention rates.
To contact Taryn email at tarynmconsulting@gmail.com