Employment dispute in Christchurch where a business faced consequences for dismissing an employee before their start date, resulting in an $18.5K payout.
What is an exit interview?
Do you know why people leave your organisation? Do you want to reduce your turnover and increase your retention? These questions can be answered by conducting an Exit Interview with employees who are voluntarily leaving your organisation. Exit interviews are a useful tool to assess the overall employee experience and identify opportunities to improve engagement and retention within your organisation.
Why conduct an exit interview?
Holding an exit interview with an employee who has voluntarily resigned is a good way to obtain information that can be useful to the company. This can assist in addressing any aspect of its culture, environment, conditions, etc. that may impact on its ability to recruit and retain staff or to improve standards of health and safety or some other aspect of its operation. EQ can provide an exit interview form which is set out to gather employee feedback in a consistent and comprehensive manner, and in a way that enables information from different individuals to be assessed, collated, recorded and interpreted to identify any issues that the company might want to address as a result of its findings.
Who should do it?
The aim of an exit interview is to obtain honest and reliable feedback. This is often hard when the interviewee is being interviewed by their direct line manager who they reported to. Often, they are reluctant to provide truthful answers because it can create a degree of awkwardness. We recommend that if the exit interview is to be carried out internally, the interviewer needs to be once or twice removed from the employee leaving. This will ensure greater transparency in the process and in the answers provided by the interviewee. Another option is to consider using a third party. An external consultant typically has several advantages over an internal interviewer. There is a lack of bias, they have expertise in exit interviewing, and they are more likely to produce reliable feedback.
Conducting the exit interview face-to-face yields better results than over the phone or via a survey. Interviewers can read body language and respond to the individual’s answers and generate follow up questions that will extract more detailed feedback.
Contact us to understand the ‘why’ behind exit interviews and to ensure that you make them count for your organisation.