How to Find Out Why Staff Are Leaving

With the traditional rise in resignations that hit businesses in February, many employers are left wondering why their staff are leaving in droves.

While the “New Year, New Career” phenomenon provides unhappy staff with a reason to leave, it’s usually not the real reason behind their resignations. It simply provides already unhappy or neutral staff with a reason to move on - now, but their real reasons for wanting to leave will vary.

Fortunately, it’s not too late to fix the turnover problem if you notice a growing pile of resignations on your desk. To find out why your staff are really leaving, ask them - with an exit interview. An exit interview is as simple as it sounds; it just involves asking your departing employees why they are leaving. Usually done face-to-face or online, exit interviews allow us to learn from any mistakes (real or imagined) that our businesses have made with our staff.

By asking staff why they are really leaving, your business can then focus on what matters to reduce staff turnover dramatically. It’s important not to assume that staff are leaving for one reason or another, as your business could end up wasting money to fix something that wasn’t broken.

Here is our simple 4-step process for creating and conducting exit interviews:

4-Step Process to Conduct Exit Interviews

1.    Decide HOW you want to conduct your exit interviews

Exit interviews are usually conducted face-to-face or online, with pros and cons for both methods. Face-to-face interviews allow you to really dig deeper into a departing employee’s answers and pinpoint the real problems. Online interviews offer a standardised survey process, so your business can directly compare responses to accurately report on statistics and trends. Online surveys generally allow for more honest open feedback, as staff can often feel reluctant to give negative feedback in a face-to-face environment.

2.    Decide WHO should conduct the exit interviews

If using a face-to-face exit interview method, the ‘who’ becomes a critical part of the survey process to get right. Because departing employees will not want to burn their bridges, the process needs to be structured to encourage genuine and constructive feedback.
To allow for real feedback, exit interviews should be conducted by someone other than the direct manager of the staff member. With many staff leaving due to issues with their manager, this is a critical step in pinpointing real problems.  Generally, an impartial person should conduct any face-to-face surveys, such as an employee from another department or a third-party.

3.    Determine WHAT to ask

To create your exit interview, think about the major areas that you want to evaluate that could be affecting staff satisfaction. Some typical areas to evaluate include:

• Workplace perceptions – i.e. their team, colleagues, managers, workplace environment
• Salary - i.e. perceived fairness of salary package and pay rise policies
• Brightness of future – i.e. the employee’s perceived future with the business
• The employee’s role
• Open suggestions for improvement

4.    Determine WHY your employees are leaving

The exit interview questions that you ask are key to obtaining actionable information. For online surveys, aim for a 10-15 minute survey, whilst 30-45 minutes is the recommended time for a face-to-face survey. Once you’ve collected your responses, now is the time to analyse them. Look for patterns across different employees and consider each piece of feedback in an unbiased way, as though you were an outsider. You can then use this information to form the basis of an employee retention strategy, once you determine which problems are really impacting upon staff turnover.

You may find that the problem isn’t you, or something that you can solve. While not all turnover is preventable, the majority of employee resignations can be avoided with simple strategies, such as improved recognition, communication, management, or career development.

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