Long goodbyes are never easy.
Businesses often cite employee retention as a greater struggle than recruitment—which has remained true even during a global pandemic. That’s why exit interviews are an excellent way to plug this leak and determine what’s going wrong. Yet, exit interviews aren’t always straightforward. Here are some simple tips on conducting an exit interview and some precautions to take.
Draw Up Questions
An exit interview should be more than an informal chat. It’s a fact-finding opportunity and an important meeting from a legal perspective.
As such, you should apply a little structure. Drawing up a list of questions and discussion points before the meeting will keep things structured, focused, and useful to both parties, making the best possible use of everyone’s time.
Think Feelings and Facts
Choosing to leave your employer isn’t always easy, and it can involve practical realities and emotional drivers. Don’t neglect either side of the question regarding the exit interview. It would be best if you got the complete picture from your employee.
This should include discussing your employee’s feelings and emotions. However, it would help if you took great care to discuss these emotions within a professional context—this is no time for recriminations and mudslinging.
Document Everything
Documentation is the best friend of compliance and analytics. By documenting everything about your employee’s exit journey, you’ll have the facts present when needed. That makes it much easier to analyze what went right or wrong with your employee’s journey and may even prove useful should they return to the company.
If any legal issues arise due to your employee’s departure, you’ll be able to show that your company has taken all the right steps and followed internal procedures. That ensures you’re much less likely to fall foul of compliance issues relating to your employee’s rights.
Be Wary of Legal Traps
Depending on the reasons behind your employee’s departure, some thorny legal issues could be associated with it. If you aren’t careful, you could add fuel to any potential legal fire by making mistakes during the exit process.
The best way to avoid these legal traps is always to think professionally. You aren’t representing yourself, but your company keeps things by the book as much as possible. By taking this precaution, ymanage financial risknagement, as legal battles can be costly.
Analyze Results
As any good business knows, future success lies in analyzing past performance. That’s no different in HR.
Exit interviews often highlight systemic problems that could be causing a high turnover. By analyzing what you’ve gathered during the exit interview, you can learn things that may improve aspects of your business, like employee morale or retention. With turnover being an expensive, endemic problem for many companies, that information could be worth its word count in gold.
How to Conduct an Exit Interview the Right Way
With these tips, you’ll know how to conduct an exit interview the right way. This will allow you to treat even the loss of an employee as a growth opportunity for your business.
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