20-20 Hindsight: Replacing Exit Interviews with Employee Engagement Data

“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

My Grandma’s admonition to zip my lip when my youthful observations were too candid sounds a lot like the advice that must be given to employees preparing for exit interviews. I read online about one consultant who tells people to lie rather than reveal uncomfortable truths about the corporate culture lest they burn bridges or jeopardize potential recommendations.

I get it. Why should employees risk their future to help the company they’re leaving? Especially if the decision was prompted by poor management, broken promises, rampant favoritism, or any of a million missteps that can occur in organizations. This is the problem in using primarily exit interview information to get a bead on why people stay or go.

When you compare most exit interviews to anonymous postings on Glassdoor – or former employee networks onLinkedIn  – the results are often alarmingly different.

Yet, 91% of Fortune 500 companies and 87% of mid-sized companies conduct exit interviews, according to one study– while less than half believe the practice to be effective.

So, what’s the alternative? In theory, analyzing why exiting employees – particularly valued performers – become dissatisfied should yield helpful data on issues that are relevant to employee turnover, retention, and performance orientation organization-wide. If exit interviews are painting too rosy a picture, is there a way to get at their true feelings?

I believe so. Many companies are unaware that an employee engagement survey instrument with a robust data platform provides the means to discern trends in sub-populations – such as the attitudes of employees who recently left the company of their own accord.

Let’s say you run an employee engagement survey. After three to six months, or even a year, depending on your turnover rates – you can conduct a gap analysis of the responses from the group of employees who left voluntarily compared with the rest of your employee population. The patterns that emerge in the see-ya-later subset can help you identify workplace issues that were important to them and went unfulfilled.  In my experience, some of the most common issues are the lack of a career development path, a poor relationship with a manager, and feeling disengaged from the company’s mission, vision, and values.

Data from employee engagement surveys is tailor-made for this application because it’s

• Accurate – Employee engagement surveys are conducted confidentially and anonymously so the responses avoid the bias and sugar-coating that typically taint exit interviews.
• Statistically robust – you can look at data across role groups, locations, and performance bands and draw meaningful, and data driven insights. As famed quality guru W. Edwards Deming said, “In God we trust, all others bring data”.
• Available – In a company that conducts regular employee engagement surveys, the data already exists, waiting to be mined. No need to waste time and resources on ineffective exit interviews.
• Inexpensive – Running this analysis is straightforward and easy to accomplish.

Employee engagement data allows you to use the 20-20 lens of hindsight to identify key issues that are causing unwanted attrition. (Coupling that retrospective analysis with monitoring of company-related postings on online career sites can provide even more perspective.)  Compared with relying on exit interviews, you can get at the truth of why employees choose to leave, in a non-subjective and non-confrontational way, that doesn’t cause former employees to be concerned about burning bridges. Somehow, I think Grandma would approve.