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Radhika Panjwani is a former journalist from Toronto and a blogger.
Hoping to unload a litany of frustrations and vent about the company’s toxic culture during your exit interview? Don’t.
“True organizational change rarely comes from this ineffective [human resources] process,” says Shelley Baker, a U.S.-based retired industrial and organizational psychologist and consultant. “And employees who provide feedback about cranky supervisors, poor work-life balance, and lack of training and development are usually just wasting their time and emotional energy by speaking into a black hole.”
The actual purpose of an exit interview is to determine if the departing employee intends to sue the company. The whole charade is to make sure the employee is not sitting on some unlodged complaint of discrimination. Exit interviews are all about the company, not the exiting employee, Ms. Baker cautions.
In an ideal world
Skilled employees are assets. Exit interviews, whether they’re a standard questionnaire, a survey, face-to-face conversations, or a combination, can provide insights to organizations on how they can retain talent. But chances are the critical feedback you provide – however justified – will largely be ignored.
A study by Harvard Business Review researchers, involving 88 executives and 32 senior leaders from more than 35 countries, reveals those surveyed admitted results from exit interviews should be actionable data. But only a third of participants said they could identify a specific example of an action taken.
Effective exit interviews expose bad managers. If several high-performing members quit a team and the turnover is high, it may be easy for the organization to connect the dots.
“We’ve all heard, ‘People leave managers, not companies,’ right?” writes Mark Logan, a professor at the University of Glasgow in a LinkedIn article. “With that in mind, managers frequently steer the exit interview away from the truth of the matter to avoid having to face or record a negative reason for the employee’s departure that could impact the manager’s ego or reputation.”
But if you really want to know why your employees are quitting, don’t wait until they’ve resigned, he says.
Ms. Baker’s advice to employees is to decline to participate. In a blog published in ToughNickel, Ms. Baker details how employees are within their rights to say no to an exit interview.
If it was poor company culture that made the employee quit, then candour during the exit interview could come back to bite, especially if the worker plans to work in the same industry.
“Why take the chance when there’s no clear benefit?” asks Ms. Baker. “An exit interview is not therapy, HR is not your friend, and the conversation is not truly confidential.”
If you want it to work
Ideally, HR should invite an impartial third party to conduct the exit interviews.
In his research, Joel Lefkowitz, a professor of psychology at the City University of New York, studied employees at a clothing factory who quit. During exit interviews, they were each asked their reasons for leaving. Then six months later, the company mailed them a questionnaire and asked again why they had quit.
During the exit interviews, most employees did not reveal the real reason – bad bosses and unreasonable work pressures – but the workers were less wary and more honest months later.
Some other best practices include giving employees a simple questionnaire; tying the exit interview data with a 360-performance data or other employee engagement data to identify patterns; and asking questions spanning several topics and then comparing it to results by former employees who had similar performance levels, tenure and role.
“An organizational culture that is toxic will chase good people away and will suffer as a result,” Ms. Baker says. “But whether they do or do not is no longer your concern. You have one foot out the door and your focus should be your new employer and your future.”
What I’m reading around the web
- Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Twitter post from an account named ‘anonymous’ urged hackers from across the globe to target Russia. The group claimed in tweets it was responsible for shutting down websites of the Russian oil giant Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian news agency RT and other government agencies, says this story on CNBC.
- This BBC article on a new report released this week by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offers clarity on how a warmer world is affecting all living things. Hint: it’s dire.
- Jesse Cramer, the founder of the blog The Best Interest shares how he changed careers; from designing satellite telescopes to personal finance and investing.
- Serial entrepreneur Robert Glazer calls out the critics who bashed Peloton founder and CEO John Foley after Peloton announced major restructuring and layoffs. In a LinkedIn article, Mr. Glazer notes, “the harshest remarks are coming from people who least understand the situation and the company.”
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