From Targeting Turnover: Never Do Exit Surveys Again

Chapter 9 of my new book, Targeting Turnover[i], is titled 3 Best-Practice Turkeys + 1 Wise-Owl Idea. Here is an excerpt regarding turkey #1.

Turkey #1: Employee Exit Surveys

If five is the maximum number of turkey icons we would use as a rating metric, exit surveys would win all five of those gobblers. The often-applied medical metaphor is that exit surveys are autopsies, meaning they provide the real reasons employees quit so management can fix those reasons and turnover then falls. But to keep up the medical jargon, let’s call exit surveys toe tags instead.

Too harsh? Many times I’ve polled HR audiences on their use of exit surveys by asking these two probes:

1. Please raise your hand if your company does employee exit surveys in any form…to which 90%-plus raise their hands.
2. Now please raise your hand again if you can think of one good outcome for your company as a result of your conducting exit surveys…and less than 5% raise their hands a second time.

On the surface, exit surveys should become strong tools to improve employee retention as long as…

• Surveys are designed to elicit the real reasons employees leave.
• Employees tell the truth.
• And organizations address these newly-discovered leave reasons by solving the problems at their roots.

But none of those things happen and here’s why.

“Better Opportunity”

Some time ago I went on a google quest to learn the supposed #1 reason employees quit their jobs…and better opportunity was the winner. And it’s the winner because nearly every exit interview questionnaire contains this response, whether the questionnaire is delivered by a person, by an online program, or by a third-person interviewer.

Since we associate opportunity with pay or career, the resulting assumption is that some other company swooped in and made our employee an offer…and that offer was financially enticing or included an exciting, higher-level job. So there’s absolutely nothing we could have done to stop that. Especially the assumed much-higher-pay part.

The truth is that “better opportunity” could have also meant a shorter commute, working with nicer people, or abandoning a jerk boss. Accepting that phrase as a leave reason is mush.

But the greater point beyond “better opportunity” being misleading is that it also implies that a new job just appeared.  And those who are leaving us know this is a safe answer because any short explanation that they provide for accepting their “better opportunity” ends the discussion.

The outcome is that “better opportunity” avoids the more deeply-rooted, drill-down discussions that come from asking questions like “Why did you look?”

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Further Reading: Exit Interviews – More Like Autopsies or Toe Tags?

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Most job changes today require the job-changer to go online and click. That first click is the first step toward changing jobs. For a very select few this first step is instead a direct inquiry from another company pitching a job that your employee didn’t know was available and had never considered. But for the great majority of job-changers, the first step is that proactive click. So much better exit interview questions become…

• When did you initiate your job search?
• Why did you initially decide to leave us?
• Was there one trigger event that caused you to seek out other jobs?
• What’s the single-best thing we could have done to keep you?

The one overlap between exit interviews and Stay Interviews is that qualified interviewers must bring great probing skills. They must recognize which broad responses contain juicy behind-the-scenes details that lead to solutions, and then probe their ways down that cookie-crumb trail to learn deep-seated truths…regardless of whether that interview’s objective is to learn why an employee is leaving or how to better help an employee to stay.

So conducting exit interviews in a way that will actually help your company is not, let’s say, an entry-level job, but instead one that requires training, practice, and feedback on how effectively that exit interviewer can seek out the real reason each employee has chosen to look and then to leave.

Little Truth-Telling

While the above section addresses a common exit survey design flaw, employees still have little reason to tell their real-life-story full truths…especially when inputting data into a computer or talking to a stranger.

Let’s make a safe assumption here that employees’ greatest frustration with employee engagement surveys…that I told you and you didn’t address my complaint…applies to employee exit surveys as well. Then why would an employee who has already checked out of her job believe that re-canting her story will make things better, for her or the person who replaces here? Besides, she’s already told her story to a few work peers and outside friends and she’s ready to move on with her life.

The survey design flaws combined with many employees’ reluctancy to be open make for an easy way out. If they can get by with “better opportunity” or by clicking just a few keys during an online survey, then telling abbreviated stories or misleading ones becomes easy and OK.

Provide Real Solutions

In most companies, exit survey results are tabulated into a report that is delivered upstream monthly or quarterly depending on turnover volume. That report rank-orders the reasons employees leave, often placing “better opportunity”, pay, or career at the top. Next steps are usually to build a few one-size-fits-all programs or to do nothing at all.

The contrast here is that the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their managers…and rarely are exit survey results delivered to that employee’s supervisor. And if they are, the results are left to that supervisor to read, interpret, and decide what if any future changes he should make to his supervisor style, with little or no coaching coming from above.

So while exit surveys bring a concept that at first glance should be helpful to our overall retention quest, the combination of poor survey design, minimal truth-telling, and the absence of constructive follow-up all dilute their value.

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Further Reading: Requiem: The End of Exit Interviews

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The Best Exit Solution I Know

Years ago, I was speaking at the Chicago University Club to about a hundred senior managers who were attending a conference there. The topic of exit surveys came up and after extensive group discussion a man in the back right corner raised his arm, stood up and spoke…with great wisdom.

This man explained that he was CEO of a 400-employee consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, and that he needed and cherished every talented employee for his firm to successfully win over and retain top clients. So when an employee quit, he had established a protocol which was widely known throughout his management ranks. No re-hire could begin until he as CEO signed the new-hire requisition order, and his managers understood he wouldn’t sign that order until they had scheduled an in-person meeting with him to discuss why that employee had left and what that manager could have done to retain that employee.

This CEO’s method worked because (1) he was skilled such that he would ask tough questions regarding why each employee left, (2) he was immediately following-up at the likely root cause, and (3) his managers knew that any exit led to an uncomfortable interaction with the CEO, so they were motivated to build trusting relationships with each employee in order to keep them.

If you’re still using exit surveys, it’s time for a better playbook.

In Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It connects the dots from workforce math to line-leader accountability, with the how-to for embedding Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow.

Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

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