Getting to the truth in exit interviews

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"Someday when I leave this place, I'm really going to tell them what I think!" If you've ever had a boss you disliked or a job you hated, these words probably sound familiar.

When you finally had that exit interview, did you tell the whole truth about why you were leaving? Probably not.

Interestingly, many departing employees don't take the chance when they get it. In fact, a recent study by Joseph Zarandona and Michael Camuso, found that employees have no real incentive to be honest during their exit interviews. Since they are on their way out, they feel that they will not directly benefit from any action taken as a result of their honesty.

Also, many employees follow the "golden rule" of organizational exiting: "Leave on good terms."

Exit interviews may encourage an employee to provide false information for other reasons. They may fear that negative comments will be made to their new employer or that they'll get a poor reference. If they hope to be reemployed by the original organization, they will guard their comments closely.

In addition, exit interviews often give employees the impression that the organization is not really interested in why they are leaving. The interview seems merely another mandatory procedure that must be completed before a final paycheck is issued.

In these cases, exiting employees usually provide professionally acceptable responses for their action: "They made me an offer with substantially more money," not "Career advancement here is limited."

To find out how truthful exiting employees are, Zarandona and Camuso studied 99 randomly selected employees who had voluntarily resigned 18 months earlier from a major engineering, construction, and consulting firm.

All 99 had been through exit interviews and stated their reasons for leaving. These former employees were then contacted by telephone and led to believe that they had been randomly selected by an independent research company for a general quality-of-work-life study. They were given the same five reasons for leaving-work environment, position responsibilities, career advancement, salary and benefits, and supervision-and asked to select the one that weighed most heavily in their decision to leave their company.

What do you suppose they found? You guessed it. They revised their reasons for leaving. At the time they left, for example, 38 percent pointed to salary and benefits as the primary reason; 18 months later only 12 percent responded the same way. Four percent had originally said they were leaving for supervisory reasons, yet this percentage increased to 24 percent 18 months later.

In the article, "The Exit Interview: Effective Tool or Meaningless Gesture?" (by Pamela Garretson and Kenneth Teel, Personnel Magazine, August, 1982) 18 major organizations were sampled to determine their exit interview procedures.

The authors were surprised to find that just slightly over half make any use of the information obtained in the interviews. Perhaps the data isn't used because it isn't reliable. So why bother collecting the data if it won't be used?

The following ideas will help organizations collect useful information to help them make needed changes in their policies, supervision and culture:

1.      Develop a standard interview format. Ensure that personnel representatives ask the same questions during each interview in a structured sequence.

2.      Conduct the exit interview anonymously. Companies can employ outside firms to hold discussions and later submit raw data. They can also schedule discussions after employees have separated. Under these conditions, employees will not be afraid to tell the truth, since they will have no fear of retribution from their employer.

3.      During the interview, convey to exiting employees that management is concerned with the actual reasons for their leaving and will use this information in a constructive, not retaliatory, manner.

4.      As a part of the procedure, have the personnel representative speak with the exiting employee’s supervisor and co-workers to help determine the actual reasons for termination. The company will then have a global picture of the reasons surrounding the employee’s decision to leave.

5.      Conduct studies like the one described above to analyze internal exit information.

Many companies are paying big bucks to hire corporate culture gurus who interview and survey employees. It seems to me, that these companies are missing a golden opportunity to get honest input on a regular basis by simply using a smarter exit interview procedure.

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