The following transcript is from an interview between Brandon Laws and Molly Kelley on the podcast episode entitled: How to Conduct Exit and Stay Interviews.”
Brandon: Joined by Molly Kelley today. Molly Kelley is a Human Resource Business Partner with Xenium and she has actually been on a couple previous shows. We’ve done Bullying in the Workplace and Creating Culture Committees. We are glad to have you back Molly.
Molly: I love being here, thank you.
Brandon: Today’s topic is on the heels of a process and development you have created for exit and exit interviews for Xenium. We are going to dive into that and talk about some of the questions and how to do some of those.
Brandon: Let’s start on the exit interview. I think people are familiar with what exit interviews are, but give your general sense of what an exit interview is and what it is supposed to accomplish.
Molly: The methodology behind exit interviews makes a lot of sense when used appropriately. Using an exit interview to sauce out how an employee felt about working for the organization, their understanding of their role and their working relationships can be extremely valuable, provided that information is used for some sort of purpose. It’s similar to having an employee satisfaction survey go out where all the results are gathered and then filed away in some filing cabinet. You really want to have a resource and a tool that’s being used for a purpose to better the organization. We have a lot of clients that collect that information and actively feed it back to the manager of the employee who is departing, whether it’s a resignation or a separation. Then that information is used to better the culture and provide training and feedback and maybe additional resources. Sometimes we find that we are doing these exit interviews and they kind of get scuttled and there’s not a lot of change. Then employees lose heart and belief in the process.
Brandon: Based on what you just said, a bunch of question popped into my head. I’m trying to figure out where I want to go first! Typically, how long after a termination or resignation does the exit interview take place?
Molly: That’s a really good question. You would hope it’s relatively soon, part of the reason being if you have an independent third party conducting those exit interviews, say Xenium or another partner, folks will tend to move on pretty quickly. If I’m starting another job and I get a call from the individual company that is not affiliated with my organization who is asking me for feedback, I’m less likely to call back if it’s more than a week out from the separation date.
The flip side of that, we’ve had this happen at Xenium a couple of times, less so recently because we’ve gotten very clear on our communication, but we’ve actually had an exit interview process set up where it was tied to our payroll process. When the final check was generated we would get a request for an exit interview. There have been times when that termination didn’t happen on time and the manager didn’t communicate and we would call an employee and say, “We understand that you’ve exited the organization and we’d like to get your feedback.” That’s obviously very awkward and very uncomfortable. We’ve really done a lot to try to shore up our processes.
Exit interviews can also, most commonly, be handled internally. The important piece there is that it is not done with the manager who was directly overseeing that position. You want your feedback to be neutral. Even though people are departing the company, they is still an impact upon relationships, references, whatever it might be that people worry about, should they give honest  feedback. We worry about it coming from a member of the HR team or potentially another stakeholder within the organization, so sometimes owners in a smaller corporation will talk to someone about how they felt working there. That feedback needs to be timely, whether it’s on the last day or a day or so after. If it’s a day or so after or a week after, you want to make sure you communicate that this person will be contacting you. You might even want to set up a calendar appointment date to follow up and make sure it happens to gather the data and feedback. If it’s happening within the person’s employment, its best to handle that within the last day or maybe no more than two days prior otherwise the data could be a little bit skewed.
Brandon: What I hear you saying is that you definitely do not want to have the manager of the employee terminating to do the exit interview.
Molly: I would really recommend that. They can do their own process – take someone out to lunch on their last day or two days before and just say I’m really intrigued to get your feedback – so it could be a separate process. Our experience has been that you get more direct, straight forward feedback – not even necessarily about the manager, but about the organization in general. Are we living up to our mission, our goals, and our values? Do you feel like you had a clear understanding of what your role was supposed to accomplish? Those questions are best answered to a neutral party in terms of gathering that feedback.
Brandon: What if smaller companies don’t have that third party? Should they be seeking somebody  to do it? Or you had mentioned if the owner of the company wants to jump in and do the exit interview or maybe some other senior level executive. What do you think?
Molly: I think it’s a really important process no matter who accomplishes that end. Whether it’s reaching out to a third party or potentially having somebody within the organization collect the feedback. Not just a paper survey – a lot of organizations will give someone an exit survey on paper which doesn’t allow the company to follow up on feedback. The reason I say it’s such an important process is because there have been numerous exit interviews that I’ve conducted where I actually had a sense of, “Wow this person is extremely disgruntled and they are likely to file a claim.” There have been a couple of situations where we’ve actually headed a complaint off from the past where somebody had said, “I’m glad you reached out to me because I was about to call BOLI.”
Brandon: Do you think that proactive touch actually saved it?
Molly: Yes, I think so. Further, knowing that it was an independent third party that they were talking to, they felt like there would be some follow up. In both of those situations it was clients that we were consulting partners with and we were able to go back at the highest levels and say, “We really feel like there was a situation of potential harassment or unprofessional conversations that were going on that made this person uncomfortable.” It allowed us to change the culture in a way that we could then circle back to the employee and say, “That isn’t going to happen again, at least not on the presidents watch or whoever took responsibility for the follow up.” That’s a really unexpected bonus of having those conversations. Even if somebody is not sitting on something really juicy, it’s one more occasion for the company to say, “We value your opinion, we want your feedback and we really want to make sure your contribution continues long after you’ve left us so we would like to reach out and find out what you think.”
Brandon: Let’s go back to the reason why you wouldn’t want to have the direct manager do the exit interview. It would be my assumption that if there was authentic feedback from the departing employee to the direct manager that depending on their personality they may take something very personal. That feedback would then be lost in translation to the leadership team. Any opinion on that?
Molly: I think that is very valid. The other piece of that is that people again, most of us don’t want to be the bad guy. Even if I feel like I have been truly wronged by the organization or my manager, I am unlikely to give that feedback. The tendency is to take a higher road and not express concerns or issues. We often find that the reason we are given for an employee separation when a client reaches out to us asking for an exit interview is resignation due to another position having been found. One of the questions we ask in our interview process is: “What made you start looking?” It’s really interesting how often people have said, “Well I’ve actually been unhappy for a while. I’ve been trying to talk to my manager or proactively reach out to the HR team and I really haven’t gotten results so I just decided I needed to look.” What might look like a cut and dry position change, maybe a promotion someone is taking or a leap up in responsibility, scope or salary, is blown out of the water by the fact that they didn’t like the culture, they didn’t like working with that manager, they were having issues within their team, they didn’t feel valued, or they didn’t know what they were contributing to the organization and the goals. It’s really important to have that neutral take on it – whoever is gathering that feedback that can then relay that to the management team and the manager in question.
Brandon: It seems to me that when you’re conducting this process for an exit interview, the most efficient way would be to do some sort of of electronic survey and that would be the easy way out. You would submit it on your last day to the departing employee and get it done that way. What you just said was interesting – there may be something deeper. If somebody is just filing out something as they are leaving, that wouldn’t be uncovered. You need someone face-to-face there uncovering things, probing, asking questions, like really what is the reason why you are leaving? It sounds like that’s why you would want to do face-to-face. Would you agree with that?
Molly: I would agree. An employee that is going to have a response of yes, no, maybe, sort of, on their written survey doesn’t allow you to get at the relationship behind the response. The same employee who is going to say yes, no, maybe, sort of is also probably the employee who is not going to communicate with their manager. Through no fault of the manager – you could have a manager who is absolutely checking-in and they are getting the yes, no, maybe – those folks may just not be comfortable opening up. They may have very positive things to say. This is not by any means a process where we are only getting negative information and dirt on someone – that is absolutely not the process.  A lot of times somebody like that might have really positive things to say but they just haven’t have been pushed to give a response beyond yes or no. Having someone say, “Give me an example when you’re manager was really supportive and responsive,” or, “Can you think of any specifics that we can note in terms of why you were unclear around your goals for that position?” That can be really helpful to have a one-on-one conversation versus electronic.
Brandon: Give us some sense on the types of questions you’d be looking for. I imagine the goals are completely different for every single company with what they are trying to accomplish with an exit interview, but what are some general questions that people can use? I’m sure you have some off the top of your head.
Molly: Yes, I do. The questions that we tend to see on most exit interviews are:

  • What was your reason for leaving?
  • What about salary increase?
  • What’s causing you to leave?

I like to see exit interviews that dive deeper into the culture:

  • What contributions do you think you’ve made to the culture?
  • What barriers have you had to being successful?
  • What are your recommendations for the future?

If you know the organization is struggling around culture and hiring the right folks and if it’s a high turnover position, asking someone: “What would be the most important questions we ask in an interview for hiring your replacement?” This really brings them into the process even as they are departing it. They are probably the person most in the position to support you in giving you valid feedback that is hopefully going to help you hire the next great fit. Asking those questions or asking them: “Did you have a clear understanding of our values or our mission?” It just helps us get an overall sense of communication. I’m seeing a lot more questions around onboarding: “Do you feel like your position played out the way we articulated it would when you were hired?” It’s making people cast their mind back if it’s been a long time. For an organization with high turnover, and maybe the training is an issue, or the onboarding process or orientations are not clearly articulating what this person will be doing in their position – that’s the way to get at the heart of that.
It’s partially general and generic questions:

  • How did you get along with your manager?
  • Did you feel supported?
  • Were you happy with your pay, compensation and benefits?

Digging deeper and thinking about:

  • What are the challenges we’ve had with this particular position?
  • What has worked well with this individual?
  • And asking, “Do you have any tips for success for the next person in your role?

This can make the process really thoughtful. People love to be asked those questions; they really feel like their opinion matters.
Brandon: Let’s move on to the stay interviews because I want to make sure we have enough time for that. This is actually a concept that I hadn’t heard of before until 3 or 4 months ago. I had heard of exit interviews before, and maybe some people are actually using the stay interview process. It seems a little more awkward so I imagine you develop a process around it. Tell listeners what a stay interview is and what the whole goal of it is.
Molly: It’s a relatively new process for me, too. It’s becoming an increasingly well-used tool for gathering feedback from people who are not leaving. The idea is: Why wait for an exit to gather feedback? Let’s talk to our current folks and make sure that they don’t leave.
If we find out that somebody feels like they are not a fit for their current role, but they are a great performer and would probably be a great fit in a different department, then we can potentially shift them over there on the basis of what we heard from checking in and feedback. Or, we can recast their role so that they are doing less data entry and using more people skills. The delicate blend here is making no promises. It really is hypothetically in an ideal world, what would you like to do when you grow up? Questions for example are:

  • When you travel to work each day, what things do you really look forward to?
  • What are you passionate about?
  • What motivates you?
  • What are you learning here?
  • What do you want to learn?
  • How do you like working with the other members of the team?
  • How do you like working for your manager?

If it’s an area where it’s a little touchy, people may be less comfortable giving feedback. With both a stay and an exit interview, you want to be really clear about who is going to see that feedback. Is it going to go just to the senior leadership team? Is it going to go just to my manager? To the owners and HR? Who is going to see this? It’s an open, honest process where they should have transparency.
Brandon: I’m tripping up on the open and honest part of the stay interview because if I’m an employee and I’m sitting down for a stay interview, I’m trying to give feedback, or at least that’s what the person interviewing me is trying to get. What’s to say that that won’t come back to haunt me in some way?
Molly: I’ve done 11 or 12 of these in the last few months and I’ve been impressed and surprised by how forthcoming people are. They will remain professional and there’s usually a sense of optimism in their responses that I have sometimes sensed is not entirely genuine. So there may be some people who have just given up on something but the same relationships that you have to navigate and work through every single day are true, whether or not they are on paper. People are usually pretty open with how they are feeling because they know that’s the reality anyways.
We have done stay interviews in situations where there have been conflicts within a team, or potentially a manager that has been having some issues within their team – so getting feedback from employees. My sense is when you ask them to open up about how they are feeling personally about their job – what they want to be doing, where they want to go, and how to work best with them – tailoring questions in a way to maximize their strengths will lead you into conversation around any issues they are having. Again these are not meant to be negative processes. We have gone into negative situations and had some real positives come out of it because we found that there was just miscommunication within teams about who was supposed to be doing what. If we realigned roles, even in a small way, people really began to hum along and feel like they were functioning at a higher level.
Brandon: Do the stay interviews capture feedback about other people or the person who is being interviewed?
Molly: I usually try to start from the perspective of the person. For example, I want to ask Brandon, “What kinds of things do you really look forward to when you’re coming to work and what really makes you feel like your skill set is being well-used by Xenium?” Sometimes we will throw in questions about the team or manager if we have a sense that people are unhappy. I might think somebody is doing a great job and feeling right at home and then find out there’s a different cast to it. My sense is that people will start out mostly talking about themselves and then it gets to a broader team and then that often leads to the manager.
Brandon: Really you are just trying to find the root cause in whatever is going on. Especially if there is a department issue you are trying to figure out is it the process? Is it the manager? Is it one employee?
Molly: It’s usually all of the above if there’s an issue. Often times it’s around communication. Another thing I would mention in this context and for people who are looking for ideas, a stay interview is something that a manager can do. You might remove the questions around: “How is your manager doing?” although I think that’s a question managers should be asking anyways! We have many companies that add that into their review process. The final step in an evaluation is: “What can I do to help support you?” Having those conversations but maybe casting them in a slightly different way can be very beneficial too.
Brandon: With a stay interview, couldn’t you capture a lot of these questions during a one-on-one or a performance review if it’s annually?
Molly: Yes and I think my goal would be that that is happening.
Brandon: Some of these questions should be asked during a one-on-one.
Molly: We actually recommend that all managers sit down with their new hire, or if you’re a new manager sit down with your team, and say, “What motivates you?” to each of your employees. That’s a really important piece of feedback. If I’m motivated by praise and I have a manager who motivates me by more money, or if I’m motivated by wanting more time off with my family and my manager thinks I need to be motivated by getting more and more responsibility which keeps me in the office, we are at a crucial disconnect here. I think it’s an important conversation to be having whether it is in the format of an actual stay interview or with a manager one-on-one. Recently we have been engaged quite a bit with doing stay interviews within departments or with individuals that are really struggling in their own role or with their managers. In that case it’s helpful to have that independent third party. If we have a sense that there are maybe some issues at foot, then having an external person, whether it be with an owner as opposed to a direct manager or an outside resource – having these conversations can be really helpful.
Brandon: As we are wrapping up, let’s talk about both the exit and the stay interviews in terms of the high level strategies as far as the results. Who sees the results once these are both conducted?
Molly: I really feel like it’s important to have the direct manager on the email as well as company ownership or leadership. That doesn’t have to be every member of the senior leadership team. If you have a very large leadership team, you want to have the direct manager of the direct manager (so a one up situation), and any other stakeholder, as well as HR. If it’s a very small organization, then we need to have an owner, manager, their support staff, or an HR team that is collecting that feedback. You then want to use that data for trends. If all of our exit interviews and all of our stay interviews are indicating that we have a terrible onboarding process, we need to work on that. Or if there’s a particular manager who is really great at emotionally supporting their employees but has no follow through and all of the employees are reporting that, then we have a huge issue. Someone needs to be in charge of gathering the overall feedback and making some sense of it.
The direct manager needs to see that feedback too, and more importantly their needs to be some debriefing if there are some serious issues revealed. Essentially there’s a meeting afterwards where if we’ve had a particularly negative response from somebody that we have a sense of where we are going. If it’s a stay interview, there needs to be a debriefing with the direct manager and the employee. For example: “I gather you had a stay interview with Xenium, I want to thank you for participating in that process. You had some really good feedback for us about where we can go with this department – sounds like you want to do a lot more in terms of less data entry and more people skill sets – I’m looking at where we can go with that. I don’t have an exact path right now but know that I know that’s an interest for you and we are going to look for it in terms of where we can go from here.”
Brandon: I imagine if you have done enough of these exit and stay interviews that you are able to capture some sort of trends and you are able to figure out some root causes of certain issues, that some of this needs to be communicated out to the entire team. Someone needs to say, “We are going to build a strategic initiative around this one thing because we figured out this is causing this.” What do you think about that?
Molly: I think that’s very important and appropriate function and response. Another thing that can happen is if certain managers decide to engage in stay interviews with their employees, other departments will wonder why they don’t get to do that. It needs to be a management wide initiative because there may be other folks who are sitting on feedback that needs to be heard. You want to make sure that you’re not just picking and choosing who you check-in with and it can’t just be your seasoned employees. Your newer employees and new hires have just as much feedback to give if not more than your seasoned folks who maybe have less of a scope of what might be really going on for new recruits. It’s really important to make sure that if you have a process you are applying it uniformly. It can take time! It might be that, let’s say for Xenium, that we start with just the payroll departments, then we move on to the HR team, then we move on to benefits, making sure that people have a sense that over the next year we are going to be reaching out to each one of you to find out what we can do to make this place better.
Brandon: Some people are probably listening right now and saying, “I do not have this process in place for my company!” My sense is that you probably don’t want to jump right in and start asking questions. How do people get started? How do they develop a process around these?
Molly: That’s a really great question. With the stay interview process, these days you can literally find anything on the internet which is all well and fine, but really think about what questions you’re asking and why. Just like we said with the employee satisfaction survey, don’t gather the responses if you are not willing to face the results. If we have an employee satisfaction survey or a stay interview where we find out that all of our employees are extremely distressed by their pay and compensation, it’s not that we necessarily have the means to have an immediate response to that and everybody gets a 10% raise tomorrow, but what are you going to do? If it seems like there is a major trend of dissatisfaction with a certain manager, then you have data to go back to that person and say, “We talked to 11 of your direct reports, 7 of which are extremely unhappy with your lack of discretion around personal confidences.” You have real specific information to circle back to but you also have the responsibility and ownership at that point.
Think about your process, think about what doors you want to open when, be strategic about it, and then there’s a lot of up front communication because people will not understand why we are suddenly looking into this. Make sure you’re communicating that you are going to start stay interviews department by department in the interest of bettering our culture and our company we are really looking for honest and thoughtful feedback that really digs deep in terms of what you guys see as a future for yourselves and this company and the results will be seen by x,y and z. Lay that structure out and then follow through because another thing that can be detrimental is when we say we are going to conduct stay interviews with every employee and then only get through 30 of the 50, those other 20 are going to feel pretty slighted. Make sure you have outlined your process and your flow throughout.
Brandon: This has been a very interesting discussion and I had a lot of fun. I imagine a lot of people are going to have some questions around this and the whole process in general. It’s pretty new to me and you mentioned that in the last few months it’s been new to you as well, so I invite listeners to go on our blog and comment and we will have Molly follow up with those folks and I will filter through those questions that come through.
Molly: Looking forward to it!
Brandon: Molly, thank you for joining us again and I’m sure we will have you again in the future.
Molly: Thank you. Both processes are really something that I strongly believe in so it’s been a pleasure to talk about. Thanks Brandon.
Brandon: I appreciate it!
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