Just wondering if a workplace with “exit interviews” gets any benefit from them?
Great value sometimes. First, it’s often an only honest non-anonymous criticism of the company. Second, employees leaving may reveal information they didn’t want to talk about like violations of policy and unreported failures. Further along that line they may reveal things about other employees that they wouldn’t do if they still had to work with them. Sometimes that’s information better left hidden, that’s a risk involved.
Both an employment lawyer I hired and a CHRO (personal friend for decades) said the same thing. The exit interview has potential benefits for the employer and potential liability for the employee.
Unless you really need to shaft someone on the way out, you have no possible gain.
Yeah, it can be helpful to learn if an employee is leaving for better pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, difficulties dealing with his/her manager, and may be the first clue we get that there’s a problem in that line of business. The interview really isn’t of much use to the employee, but it can be useful for the employer. Most of the time there’s no big revelation, but sometimes they provide us with enough information that we can poke around figure out what the problem is.
All of that assumes the company cares.
In most of mine they weren’t useful. But in one instance I had already built a strong rapport with the VP of HR, so I was comfortable being honest. It was at a small startup. I had specific complaints about my grandfather — my boss’s boss. That guy needed to go. I jotted down notes to organize my thoughts, and kept them factual and without emotion. Even though the situation with that grandfather really pissed me off.
It was a good meeting, and three months after I left, that grandfather had also left and I heard from friends that they had been driven out. After that departure, things improved dramatically.
It’s unfortunate, because I wish I still worked their. But, alas, I’d moved on.
If the company doesn’t care they’re probably not conducting exit interviews. And there have been a few times when soon-to-be former employees have asked, er, demanded an exit interview and I’ve said to them, “Thanks, but no thanks. We’re cool.”
The only ‘Exit Interview’ I ever had was conducted by my “Team Leader” who I ratted out to upper management for sleeping in his cube and forging numbers.
I was dismissed for Mis-use of Company Email Protocol. 
I walked out of a government job 4 months before retirement (it cost me $23.27 per year for the rest of my life) and my exit interviews were instrumental in getting the office manager fired. A couple of co-workers sent me flowers after that happened.
Totally worth it.
Companies aren’t monolithic entities. It is entirely feasible to have HR conducting interviews because someone in HR read somewhere that’s it’s a “best practice”. But contrary to popular belief, HR doesn’t actually run the company. Whether or not leadership actually decides to take action on or even look at the feedback from those interviews is another matter.
Plus I think most of the time, people leave companies for reasons that are relatively mundane. They took a better job or maybe just a different one.
The question as posed was whether workplaces get any value from exit interviews - whether participating individuals get any benefit is a different question.
Speaking from an institutional viewpoint, I’d say “yes, of COURSE” there is benefit. It is a best practice. The workplace might learn something useful, but even if it doesn’t: Whenever your minders come calling - board, stockholders, parent company, journalists, anyone who wants to examine whether or not you are doing things right - you’ll have your ducks in a row. That can’t hurt.
You can find out a lot earlier with company surveys, which don’t have the downside of coming from someone who is leaving. I’ve never seen the results of exit interviews, but I have been in meetings analyzing comments from surveys, and there is an amazing amount of denial going on. Any negative comments must be coming from bad employees or trouble makers. Even easier to ignore the words of “traitors.”
The people who leave are going to be the better workers, in general. I don’t think it is a good business practice to find out problems from letting your good workers get fed up and leave.
I don’t know if you have seen this, but for the 10 years before I retired people leaving the company never said where they are going. And when we found out it wasn’t to a competitor, so there was no reason for them to expect getting marched out the door when they gave their announcement (which I’ve seen.) And even when they did go they’d hardly give HR their new salary.
For many years I was in a sort-of-kind-of management position. Low enough that the rank and file felt comfortable telling me what they were fed up about. Also low enough not to be heard any more than they were.
I begged the Department to conduct exit interviews, so that when they heard the same story again and again as I did they might come to the same conclusions I did.
Maybe it would’ve helped. I’ll never know.
(BTW, they insisted they did such interviews regularly, but I never talked to a single person who had one. I sure didn’t when I left.)
The exit interviews I’ve gone thru were most often with the manager whose mis-management was causing me to leave (or the higher-up who allowed this). So, as Voyager said, “an amazing amount of denial going on”.
Once a manager said “I’m astounded at what you’re saying – I’ve never heard such complaints.” I responded “isn’t this about the same that Joe said when he left last month, and a couple months before that, when Sue left and cc’d the whole department on her exit letter – didn’t that say much the same thing?” So then the higher-up manager interrupted and said we should keep this exit interval about me and not drag in other employees.
I’m pretty sure that nothing I said in those exit interviews got passed on to higher levels in the organization, or had much chance of changing anything.
When I left my employer of 18 years, I received an email from HR scheduling the exit interview. Having been in management with the company, I believed this interview served no beneficial purpose with the exception of providing the company with bragging rights in that they can claim that yes, we conduct exit interviews. Other than that, exit interviews were never discussed.
My email reply to HR explained that my experiences and opinions involving my employment with them were very personal to me and I would be unable to share them during the interview. During the actual interview, I was asked why I was leaving now and I simply responded, “Because I can.” Now, did this serve any purpose? I believe it did because that was my final official act with the company and it allowed me to walk out the door and never look back.
I am in agreement the main benefit to a company from exit interviews is to be able to check a box. While they may occasionally get useful info, as we can see from the small sample here, it’s a crap shoot, as is how that info is accepted by the company.
For the outgoing employee, it’s an opportunity to burn or preserve a bridge, and the motivation for either will color how honest the comments are.
When I left the one and only job I quit in frustration, I met with my boss’s boss and her boss. I told them both quite frankly that I was leaving because of a particular coworker and I told them exactly why. From their questions, I gathered that they were looking to terminate the coworker. No idea if they did but they should have!
Probably not, but I did notice that one company I left early on in my career did change their inflexible work schedule of 4 nine hour days and 1 four hour day per week. I understand the intent, every worker had a half day off to get things done outside of work, but it was a pain. I don’t want to have to spend all the time getting ready to go to work and commuting for just a half day. But, they refused to consider 4X10 shifts at that time. It was definitely something I mentioned in my exit interview.
Yeah, I’ve seen a bit of that. At my current company, one of the Managing Directors on my team apparently left the company. I had no idea what happened until I saw him update his Linkedin profile. Even when some of the partners left last year, there was very little in terms of formal announcements.
It’s almost like there is a culture of managed (or nonexistent) communications where good news is qualified and bad news isn’t communicated at all.
Whether the workplace gets any benefit from exit interviews is going to depend a lot on the specifics. My former workplace ( a state agency) would have gained nothing - there were very limited reasons why people left. They retired , took a promotion to another state agency, moved out of state or resigned in lieu of termination or arrest ( important later). In 33 years, I know of one person who was terminated and there was one person who left to concentrate on his private practice. An exit interview would not have had any benefit - he had been telling people for five years that he would retire when he had enough time in the pension system to get health insurance, he was going to quit.
They tried to get information through surveys of current employees , but that didn’t work. Because somehow, everyone was afraid that they would be targeted for disciplinary action if they said something the bosses didn’t like - and they didn’t believe the surveys were anonymous. Remember what I said about resigning in lieu of arrest - happened with three people that I had personal knowledge of . My agency tried very hard to avoid disciplnary action of any sort.