How exit interviews can help companies

Employee exits is one of the harshest realities for most companies; harsh, especially because there are costs involved, as human resource consultants will tell you, in hiring and training.

In fact, in a survey done in North America in 2011 by Society of Human Resource Management and Globoforce, called the SHRM/Globoforce Employee Recognition Tracker Survey, 99 per cent of the HR leaders surveyed anticipated employee engagement to be a key challenge in the future.

What's more, of the 85 per cent respondents who tracked employee engagement levels, 71 per cent did so via employee exit interviews. In other words, companies were learning about engagement issues when employees exited.

Exit interview should not be viewed as a means of determining why employees quit organisations; rather it should be used as a tool to identify consistent trends to reduce future turnover.

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Maclean Raphael, vice-president, HR, 3M India, a US-based multinational conglomerate, says, Based on the trends and findings of these interviews, companies can make relevant policy changes, evolve better work culture, address critical issues and evolve best practices for the long-term benefit.

Experts say the trend of conducting scientific and structured exit interviews has picked up in India only in the last four-five years. The data captured can give insights into how many of the emerging sectors, e-commerce, for instance, should move forward, says Pankaj Mittal, director, Archelons, an HR consultancy firm.

Essentially, there are three prime objectives for conducting exit interviews: one, creating a better work place; two, keeping check on HR policies; and three, retaining employees.

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Archelons data suggests that Indian companies can easily control 10 per cent of the turnover every year if they conduct effective exit interviews and take corrective measures quickly.

In order to understand how companies can take positive learning from exit interviews, the interview needs to be carefully drafted.

Then, again, for the blueprint to be perfect, HR managers need to understand just why employees might quit. Leigh Branhams immensely successful book, The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How to Recognize the Subtle Signs and Act Before Its Too Late, based on the analysis of nearly 20,000 third-party exit interviews by the US-based Saratoga Institute, lists the top seven reasons why people quit: unmet expectations versus the reality of the workplace; job-person mismatches; the lack of coaching and feedback; perceived lack of career growth opportunity; feeling devalued and unrecognised; stress and burnout due to overwork and life/work imbalance; loss of trust and confidence in senior leaders.
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<b>Conduct a rewarding interview</b>

After speaking to HR managers across industries, HR consultants and practicing managers, The Strategist concludes that there are five ways in which managers can ensure exit interviews are fruitful and not merely token gestures.

Assuring confidentiality of the employee, creating an exhaustive questionnaire, being a well-trained and sensitive listener, outsourcing the process and timing the interview correctly, can make the process productive for companies.

While one tool might suit one company, another company might need to  tweak it to suit its organisational philosophy.

However, most agree that when the candidate is genuinely giving invaluable inputs, and may want a confidentiality clause, those conducting the interview, should respect it in a bid to extract the maximum benefit from the interaction.

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Timing-wise, while many companies in the West interview ex-employees even three to six months after they have quit, in India, the trend still is to hold the exit interview when the person puts in his  papers and is serving out his notice.

A single interaction may not be enough at times. Mukesh Kumar, head, HR, HDFC Ergo, says, We like fresh and relevant impressions that the exiting employee has of the company.

So, we have an interview, just a few days before the employee's last day in office. However, ensuring that the relevance of the exit interview is not lost, we follow up even a month or two after she has quit.

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At Emkay Global Financial Services, where the exit interview is always a one-on-one exercise, the companys HR head Ruth Singh, says that it is a layered process consisting of telephone conversation, face-to-face interaction, online conversation, besides the conventional pen-and-paper format done at different times.

Given the high replacement costs, our first objective is to retain the employee. If she has made up her mind, our next line of conversation is based on what can be done to make the company better so that others don't leave, says Singh. At Emkay Global, the final round of exit interviews happen 48 hours before the outgoing employees last day.

We tried conducting exit interviews, months after employees quit but found it wasnt beneficial given that the ex-member of the organisation had already moved into the new role and wasnt too willing to spend too much time, she says.

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Many companies in the West also engage third-party specialists of repute for exit interviews, given that they are more likely to possess critical skills for the exercise.

According to Subeer Bakshi, director, Talent & Rewards, Towers Watson, though it is prohibitive to conduct exit interviews by third-party specialists, especially in dynamic times witnessing high attrition, using professional interviewers, and technology, with structured questionnaire on the lines of engagement surveys to capture sentiments of ex-employees, can be beneficial.

That explains why 3M, for instance, outsources the exercise to allow employees to open up and speak freely with the interviewer. In some instances, trained psychologists are also part of the interview process who find out independently if the organisation has heard out the employees, managed to give them a growth trajectory.

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Some others are trying to hone the skill in-house. At HCL Technologies, people within the HR team are coached to administer exit interviews.

According to Prithvi Shergill, chief HR manger, HCL Technologies, Given the critical and sensitive nature of exit interviews, we conduct it by people who understand the organisational context, especially given that the goal is to gather meaningful information for the betterment of our practices and understand if specific drivers could have led the employee to make a different decision.

Given that exits and conversations around the subject  are difficult, a good exercise then should allow frank discussions, especially on the part of the outgoing employee.

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Technopaks deputy general manager, HR, Anuricha Chander says that a third-party intervention is a strict no-no.

The passion to retain the employee, to understand why she may have quit, will be missing when a third party steps in, she reasons. In her view, the trending data of exit interviews should be mapped to the particular organisations philosophy and planning, which can be achieved when interviews are conducted internally.

Who knows a well-done interview can actually give you ideas on how to improve established processes. At Infosys, feedback from exit interviews resulted in things like flexibility in the induction process and improved managerial effectiveness, says the company's senior vice-president and group head of HR, Nandita Gurjar.

At Emkay, a structured leave policy, especially in the brokering division, emerged directly from the findings of exit interviews, wherein the company found that employees had genuine concerns about it initially.

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In the division, weekends used to get counted as part of leave if they fell during an employee's leave period; later on, feedback gleaned from exit interviews suggested that it was time for change. So the company decided that only working days would be counted.

Similarly, in the sales division of the company, the lack of interaction between sales and research teams led to motivation issues, prompting some people to move on. This insight helped the company to introduce the system of peer review and team building exercises.

Evidently, the benefits of engaging with an exiting employee can reveal interesting insights that you would have missed before. But the onus of making it work lies both on the interviewer and the interviewee.

The company representative must create an environment where trust and confidentiality of the employee is respected. The exiting employee, too, must value the process as an opportunity to provide constructive feedback about the workplace, says Shergill of HCL Technologies.