How to carry out an exit interview with your employee?

The importance and concept of Exit Interviews

It might come as a surprise to clichéd employers and other employees who underestimate their importance to the organization, that it costs much more than just human resource when someone resigns from a company. You might think that employers can easily replace an employee, who is leaving with someone new, but there are things that take time to develop and this is what costs the companies in today’s competitive world. For starts organizations spend time and money on training their employees, tell their secrets to working and beating competition etc and when that employee leaves, all this information goes with them. This is a cost which might be difficult to term in the context of financial loss, but is anyway a huge one.
This is the reason, employers who have understood the cost of their employees leaving and are keen on developing a strong workforce focus on understanding what is going with employees, their thought processes and try to figure out a way to keep things going under a momentum.

Even when employees leave these employers try to understand the reasoning, conflicts, troubles and the best part from that individual’s perspective in order to better the work process. A conversation that goes between an employer and an employee who has recently resigned is usually called an “exit interview”. For a long time exit interviews did not have a great importance in the eyes of human resources or the line managers, but now it has become a regular routine of multinational organizations. Their importance and strict practice, has also resulted in effective changes to align workforce time to time and keep them happy. Today, we will discuss some important elements on how to conduct an effective exit interview.

Do not delay the exit interview

An exit interview might become an awkward conversation between a soon to be former employee and employer, but is still effective and important. So instead of delaying over it, make the timing right and conduct the interview as soon as the need arises. This will give you time to assess the circumstances and if there are some serious issues, for which your employer is leaving. Not only that, you will also be able to take timely actions in order to cure or stop the damage to your work force.

Earn the leaving employee’s trust

Your employee might be leaving because of some bad situation or a good opportunity. Whatever the case is, he might be hesitant to share with you the secrets of the workforce, but you can earn his trust be convincing him that the interview is for the betterment and get to know underlying issues or circumstances within the work force.

Follow up after the interview

Once the interview is over, learn to take criticism from your employees. Admit that there can be flaws in your management or workforce and you need to improve on them. So the exit interview is only effective if you follow it up with a concrete action plan for improvements.