Before You Go…

How many of you out there have ever had an exit interview? To date, my working life has included about 22 years of full-time employment, and in the dozen or so jobs I’ve had so far (which I realize is too many for only 22 years – especially when you consider that one of those jobs lasted 5 years and two others were 3 years each) only two companies actually conducted an exit interview with me when I left. In one or two cases, where I had been laid off or asked to resign, I suppose my employers might have felt that I didn’t have much to tell them (they were wrong, in fact), but in the remaining eight cases, it was mostly a matter of the company not doing such interviews, my boss being too unprofessional to bother about one, or some other form of institutional failure…

When I left my job with Tosco in Phoenix I was so exasperated that no one was going to interview me (the company had turned down my request for an interview) that I wrote down all of my comments and sent it to our Director as a memo. But what I have since discovered is that almost no one seems to conduct these interviews; outside of very large and very regimented organizations (like my late employers) most people seem to feel that someone who has elected to leave the company is no longer relevant to the future of the organization, and if they’ve been laid off, asked to leave, or fired, there’s no point in even listening to them. Indeed, you’d better have them escorted off of the premises before they have a further bad influence on the rest of your people or, you know, steal something…

I’ll admit that if you’ve fired someone for gross incompetence, there may not be much point in trying to capture what they know about the organization. But even someone who does not do their job properly may still know things about the company that the management team doesn’t, and someone who has elected to leave voluntarily almost certainly does. The purpose of doing these interviews is not just to find out why someone has chosen to leave, but also what they know about the firm, what they think is positive, what they think needs work, where your organization is weak, and where it is strong, and so on. Because, let’s face it, it’s now or never…

From a management standpoint, the exit interview gives you a unique opportunity to look inside your own organization and find out what your employees really think about you and your policies. An employee who is leaving the company will tell you things they would never dare say when there was a chance that you would fire (or discipline) them; they’ll tell your human resources people things you would not believe. Conflicts between employees, abuses of power and privilege, unsuspected rivalries, and outright flaunting of company regulations (and sometimes the law) may come to light at this time. And then there’s the possibility that the departing employee hasn’t been doing the job you thought they were doing in the first place…

The bottom line is that like most feedback opportunities, the majority of all exit interviews will not produce anything spectacular, unexpected, or even interesting; but that one occasional example might contain a single nugget of information that could change your entire operation for the better – or save the company from destruction. It might seem tedious, expensive and time consuming to conduct those interviews (or just expensive, if you pay the human resource people to do them for you), but I have to ask if you can really afford to take the chance of missing that one special piece of information. Can you, in fact, afford to take the chance of ignoring your employees’ opinions in the hope that they don’t know anything you need to know? It’s possible, I suppose – but I for one would not want to bet the company on it…