Why do staff leave?
Gathering exit insights when staff decide to leave
By Lauren Gatt
Our desire to understand why employees leave is not surprising, given that turnover is expensive and can have a number of disruptive impacts on your team. Reported costs can be up to 33% of an employee’s annual salary to recruit, select and train successors[1] and other areas can be negatively impacted including customer satisfaction, organisational knowledge and team dynamics. With such fierce competition for talent, it’s important to use all tools available to both attract and retain great staff.
Exit surveys are one tool that many organisations use to address this issue and this article looks at why capturing exit feedback is effective for improving the things your staff care about most.
Why conduct exit surveys?
There are many reasons to conduct exit surveys, but to name a couple:
Insights to support retention: The feedback exiting employees offer can be used to improve the experience and retention of existing employees. A thoughtful exit process can provide valuable insights that can support a continuous improvement cycle of an organisation to reduce future turnover.
Identify trends: It also allows you to uncover and trends in the reasons people are leaving your organisation. For example, are they leaving to take roles in similar organisations or leaving the sector? Is there a particular tenure bracket that staff tend to leave within that requires targeted attention? What are the typically lower-rated areas for staff who are leaving, and how far below are these results from the perceptions of remaining staff? The answers to these questions and more can be explored easily within the our survey results portal.
Last impressions matter: People tend to remember the early and latter stages of their experiences, in what psychologists term ’primacy’ and ‘recency’ effects – this is why the onboarding and exit surveys are such important parts of the employee lifecycle. In this vein, our exit survey deliberately includes an open-ended question at the end, which asks staff to reflect on the things they most valued in the organisation. This not only helps organisations understand their differentiators as an employer, but leaves things on a positive note for the exiting employee.
·Walking the talk: Many employers like to say that they are ‘people focused’, but by demonstrating to employees that you value their opinion even after they have made the decision to leave, you are truly living that value. And employees won’t forget it. In fact, employees often return to previous organisations that they have left on positive terms, which can help with future recruitment drives.
What do we ask about in exit surveys?
Advocacy The goal of a successful exit is for the employee to remain an advocate of the organisation as an employer and service provider long after they have left. This is our key outcome measure, and one to track on your dashboard for leaders to monitor. Advocates can help efforts to attract future staff by spreading the good word about your organisation.
Key exit drivers Research shows that one of the best predictors of turnover is engagement. As a huge amount of research (including our own) suggests, if workplace practices are working well, then people are engaged and they generally want to stay. To understand the most important practices for exiting staff, we analysed our engagement survey data to identify which practices had the strongest correlation with employee intention to stay at an organisation. We’ve also added some other areas shown to be important for turnover in recent research, such as person-organisation fit, wellbeing and perceptions of fairness.
Reasons for leaving In addition to workplace experiences, a range of personal and contextual factors can contribute to a person’s decision to leave an organisation, including their tenure, age, parental status, financial and family considerations. It is important to capture these to better understand the push and pull factors for your workforce.
Rich qualitative data We include open-ended questions to enable exiting staff to identify what the organisation could have done to keep them, what could be done to improve the experience of remaining staff, and what they most valued about working for your organisation. This is particularly helpful when reviewing individual feedback, and beneficial for the exiting employee to reflect on.
Gathering exit insights
All about timing
The ideal time to conduct an exit survey is after the person has given notice but before they actually leave. Response rates tend to drop off significantly once they have actually left, and the quality of the data also declines as more time lapses. It’s also helpful if the exiting employee has already received references and therefore feels comfortable providing candid feedback.
Should you conduct exit surveys for involuntary exits?
It’s still important to seek feedback from individuals who have not left voluntarily, but it’s crucial that the questions are appropriate and not insensitive. We have two versions of our exit survey to accommodate for both voluntary and involuntary exit.
Who should have access to data?
Given our exit surveys allow for the organisation to see individual-level data, it’s important that there are clear guidelines in place for who has access to the data. Best practice is that HR would monitor high-level insights and trends, and support supervisors to access and action relevant individual-level feedback.
Going a step further
Some organisations choose to conduct exit interviews rather than surveys, and vice versa.
Exit interviews provide incredibly rich and nuanced information, and are also a valuable point to check in on the psychological wellbeing of exiting employees and provide them with some closure. Surveys, while providing less detailed insights, do allow for you to benchmark against similar organisations and also track trends over time.
The ideal solution is to offer both when an employee leaves.
Find out more
Capturing feedback is important right across the employee lifecycle, including after people have made the decision to leave. Our exit survey is available to clients as part of the Voice Project survey suite and our workplace psychologists can help you uncover the actionable insights that increase your employee engagement. To find out more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Consultant, or get in touch via our contact form or on 1800 886 423.
References
[1] https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/478187/2017%20Retention%20Report%20Campaign/Work%20Institute%202017%20-Retention%20Report.pdf
Voice Project provides research-backed surveys that measure employee engagement, leadership capability and customer satisfaction. These state-of-the-art surveys help organisations get the best feedback to drive positive change. Voice Project works with organisations across the not-for profit, private and public sectors. Get in touch.