Yes, if exit interviews are HR just going through the motions, then company surveys are just me going through the motions. I don’t believe they’re anonymous and I don’t believe they change anything*, so I’m only doing it so my boss can see that I did it.
* Many years ago the company I worked for would do an annual survey, and the top two or three complaints were what they would focus on for that year. Then the next year’s survey would have a new set of complaints, and they’d focus on those, completely ignoring the issues that had been the focus the previous year. So I never got the feeling that they were actually trying to change things for the better, only maybe get a better score the next year.
One time I resigned from a company (totally friendly, just found a better opportunity), and in the exit interview they asked me to sign an “exit form”. Basically it said that in exchange for my severance pay, I agreed never to badmouth or sue the company. Since I was resigning there was no severance pay, just my final paycheck and what they legally had to pay me for earned vacation. I presume that’s the form they used for people being laid off. The HR rep was shocked and somewhat put out when I told her I wasn’t signing that.
I was asked twice to do exit interviews when leaving two jobs as a college prof. I passed on both.
If there was any chance of the exit interview having any positive impacts on the places, I wouldn’t have been exiting in the first place. Some places are just beyond hope.
I worked one job for a couple of years that was outside of my normal specialty in engineering. I had two bosses who were fantastic but the small company, wholly owned by one person, was awful.
I got a job back in my normal field and gave my notice. My two bosses were also looking to leave and I knew that they’d always give me a great reference and I’d probably never work in that field again.
It wasn’t an exit interview exactly. It was a survey that I filled out. Other than praising my bosses and co-workers, I ripped the crap out of them. I called out the owner’s offensive behavior and how they treated their suppliers unfairly. It was so cathartic. I was friendly with the two HR reps and they were blindsided and very surprised. They really didn’t know what to say to me. I highly doubt anything changed.
I’ve never found them to be useful. I do have what I think to be a very funny story about one, though.
I worked for a pharmaceutical company that had been spun out from a larger pharmaceutical company. It was common knowledge that a number of personnel files never made their way from corporate HQ to what was now the only facility (and thus, HQ). Indeed, this had been a sore point because Big Daddy just didn’t care enough to dig them up and send them over.
During my exit interview I was asked to sign a new NDA, since my original was lost. I was also asked to sign a non-compete.
I politely declined, but I’m pretty sure I was not successful at concealing the look on my face.
I gave one exit interview once. Many times I’ve left a job and they’ve wanted to know why and I’ve told them, but only once did I ever have a formal interview. It was a software company I worked at and left.
It was pretty comfortable and I didn’t have anything really nasty to say. I didn’t have any great animosity to the company, it just wasn’t compensating me properly. Basically, I wasn’t making enough money to afford to live anywhere near the company, and was commuting for hours every day from my home in a cheap area to the workplace (about 3 1/2 hours total commute every day). Also, the benefits were awful; I got medical coverage but my wife didn’t.
It was non-confrontational, I had objective reasons for leaving, and had some objective evaluation of the company and what it was like to work there. They seemed interested and appreciative of what I had to say. I don’t think I really got anything out of the interview, but again I liked the company well enough and didn’t mind giving them some info they might use to improve.
The job I went to paid significantly more, and I was able to move myself and my wife into an apartment just minutes away from my new office. It was so much better.
I would treat exit interviews as a diagnostic to be applied when there are anomalous patterns in people leaving.
If the amount of resigntions is statistically reasonable and spread across different units/managers in an even fashion, I would 't do exit interviews. But if I saw clusters of resignations, or disproportionate numbers under certain managers or business units, I might start interviewing the people who leave to try to suss out what’s going on, if anything.
I suppose one way to determine if the exit interview is useful to the company would be to demand a consultant’s fee as a condition of your participation. I suspect very few companies would be willing to put a price on this “best practice,” and that may tell us something.
I’m reminded of a comment Dan Rather supposedly once made, for when a boss tells you “Now I want you to be completely frank with me”.
His advice was to be on your guard and prepare to lie like hell.
Re exit interviews: what you say could have a substantial impact on what references you get in the future. If you don’t care and really want to get something off your chest, then let fly. Otherwise, I’d be very circumspect with what I said.
I’ve been willing to criticize employers, and even bosses, on the way out, but always in a way that assumes that I may yet need a reference or other connections.
In other words, I don’t make it personal and I will avoid anything too sacrosanct.
However, from a game theory point of view, I know I should not say anything. I just can’t help it after years of working at a place.
Typically an exit interview is conducted when an employee is on their way out rather than after they’ve left. We switched from face-to-face interviews about six years ago to an exit survey instead. Even pre-COVID, with thousands of employees and a 10% turnover rate, there just wasn’t enough time to try to set up the interviews let alone actually interview them. Most employees didn’t want to be bothered with it and declined anyway.
For context, most of my management experience is in small businesses and nonprofits. The largest company where I had a high-level management role had 160 employees. I found exit interviews useful, but probably not for the same reasons as they do within a large corporate structure.
First, they showed me where we had communication problems. For example, if someone said they were leaving because we didn’t offer some particular benefit that we actually did offer, that showed me that it was our fault for not explaining things better.
Second, they showed where we needed to fix our job descriptions when hiring. When I was running a wildlife sanctuary in Montana, we had to include “clearing snow as necessary” on every single job description (including mine!) because when we got a heavy snowfall, every single person who was physically capable had to grab a snow shovel or snowblower and get out there clearing paths and making sure the keepers could get to all of the animals to feed them. People who couldn’t shovel could still be trained to drive a snowplow or a tractor and help.
An anecdote regarding communication: During one exit interview, an employee complained bitterly about several of our policies, prompting me to wonder why they even accepted the job in the first place. Some of those policies were baked into the organization’s mission, but nobody had explained that when she interviewed for the job.
Most people leave for being ordinary reasons. Their spouse got a job in another state. They were offered more money by a competitor. They decided they don’t like this work and quit being an underwriter to become a truck driver. (Okay, not so ordinary, but not something the company is going to do anything about, either.)
But I’ve heard several stories from people who said their boss was horrible in these quantifiable and objective ways, and they complained at their exit interview, and the next year, after another employee or two made the same exit complaint, the boss was fired. So i believe exit interview can be useful.
Every management class I ever took said that the number one reason people leave was their boss. Not money, not working conditions, but management.
Not necessarily a monster boss, but a boss who doesn’t support an employee or who is mentally absent can drive people out the door just fine.
As someone who handles benefits for a good sized company with thousands of employees, no, no it does not show you are at fault for not explaining things better. A lot of employees do not read emails, do not attend benefits presentations, they don’t read any benefits information published and sent directly to their homes, nor do they read the benefit information the pops up on their screens as they’re making their elections during open enrollment, as new hires, or while making changes for a qualifying life event. If it sounds like I’m salty about this it’s because I am. From an administrative point of view it’s a pain in my ass.
Don’t get me wrong, maybe there’s some problems with how the company communicates, but just because an employee doesn’t know about a benefit offered doesn’t mean the company didn’t do what they could to inform them.
Well, I’ve only worked for one company with thousands of employees (Cisco Systems), and they had a mandatory orientation seminar with videos, live presentations, and a ton of handouts and swag. I also had to attend various “bootcamps” when I started there, each of which was a week or two long. It would not have been possible for the small organizations I worked for to justify the cost of doing that when we were generally only hiring a few new people each year.
So instead, we had to do one-on-one sessions with new employees going off of a single-page checklist. The only handouts we had were the employee manual and safety manual. The information I got from staff meetings, casual chats, and exit interviews helped me to adjust that checklist and see what I had to spend more time on when we hired a new employee.
But, the quantifiably and objectively horrible boss remained in place for a whole additional year, making one or two more employees quit. There has to be better and more responsive ways to identify bad managers and either help them improve or fire them before a whole year (or more) goes by.