Exit interview forms are often used by employers to facilitate the exit interview process. Using a template makes it easier to collect information from departing employees. Analyzing the feedback also becomes simpler because they are consistent in form and easier to compare and compile.
What Is an Exit Interview
Companies perform exit interviews at the end of a person’s employment to understand why they decided to leave the company. The interview is designed to gather feedback about their experience with the company, and what they were happy or unhappy with.
In this sense, exit interviews are a means of learning about company culture, employee satisfaction, and how to improve them. They can be conducted either during an in-person exit meeting, as part of the exit paperwork, or online. Among the three, online exit interviews have proven to be the most effective.
The Benefits of Exit Interviews
There are several benefits to performing exit interviews.
Cost-Effectiveness
Exit interviews require very little time and money to conduct. While the feedback you can collect from them can be invaluable and very hard to obtain through other means. This makes them a very cost-effective solution for assessing your organization’s strong and weak points.
Unbiased Feedback
Surveying employees regularly is imperative for assessing engagement and morale. However, current employees may be less than completely honest when filling out surveys. After all, they might fear the consequences of expressing their true opinion. Exit interviews can give you unbiased feedback since the departing employee has no reason to hold back anything.
Insight Into Your Work Environment
Getting a clear picture of your work environment can be tricky. You might assume all your employees are satisfied just because there are no complaints, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Through exit interviews, employees will give you first-hand insight into how your staff feels about their workplace environment.
Improve Employee Retention
By acting on the information received in exit interviews, you can improve employee happiness and engagement. This, of course, could lead to a better retention rate and potentially save you a lot of resources. The reason is that retaining employees is far more cost-efficient and preferable than onboarding and training new ones.
Exit interviews are a great tool to gather first-hand information about your organization from those who were a part of it. However, in order to make the most of them, you would be well advised to use an exit interview form template. This way, you’ll be able to track and compare the results you are getting since the questions are always the same.
Exit Interview Tips
Choosing the right questions for your exit interview form is perhaps the most important step in creating and conducting exit interviews. Knowing which questions to ask and which to avoid will help you improve the quality of the feedback data and come up with actionable steps you can take.
What Questions To Ask
Generally, you should always inquire about the reasons behind the employee’s decision to leave your organization, as well as what you can do to eliminate them in the future. You should also ask what the employee thinks are the best, worst, and in-between practices within the organization and how they can be maintained or improved. Finally, you can also ask how other employees feel about certain practices or the company in general and what changes they would like to see.
What Questions Not To Ask
You should never ask personal questions or questions targeted at other people in the office. Try to keep the exit interview form as professional as possible. After all, your goal is to collect feedback that can help you improve different aspects of your business.
If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in our other human resource templates.
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