Several organisations offer exit surveys or interviews. Exit-Info is different. Because we specialise in exit interviews we've spent a lot of time making sure our way of doing things is as powerful as it can be. When you are evaluating us or another provider of exit surveys or interviews make sure you investigate the following criteria. Each is critical to ensuring that your exit interviews deliver on their full potential. Exit-Info's offering is outstanding on every one.

CRITERIA FOR HIGH QUALITY EXIT INTERVIEWS

• The questions should be based on both empirical research and practical experience. More>>
• There should be enough of the right questions to ensure that "actionable insights" can be extracted. More>>
• Internal consistency of responses must be ensured real time as you only have one chance to get the information. More>>
• Departing employees must control the disclosure of their feedback to ensure they are comfortable being open and honest. More>>
• You need to ensure you are getting high response rates to minimise the risk of sampling error that can lead to incorrect conclusions. More>>
• Reporting tools must allow intelligent insights and action plans to be easily drawn out of raw data. More>>
• Price should be consistent with value. More>>

DATA QUALITY

The saying "garbage in, garbage out" is very relevant to exit interviews. If you don't ensure a high quality of data going into your exit database, any reports you then produce from it will also be of a low quality.

It is better not to do exit interviews at all than to put insufficient effort into ensuring high quality data. Not only will poor quality interviews cost you time and money, they may provide meaningless data. This can lead to spending more time and money addressing issues that are not actually going to reduce your staff turnover. There are two important aspects to data quality - the survey questions and quality control.

Survey Questions

You need to ensure that the questions you ask are actually going to help you address staff turnover. Exit-Info's interview is a thorough exploration of the issues that are known, through empirical research and a depth of practical experience, to affect staff turnover and retention. We recommend you explore the basis of the question design from any provider you are considering That is, where did the questions come from? In our experience it is uncommon for exit interviews to be structured around solid empirical research as Exit-Info's are.

One important short-coming of 'self service' exit interviews such as online surveys is that they are limited in the number of questions that respondents are willing to answer before the task becomes too onerous. This limits the depth of analysis you will be able to do.

• For example, it's one thing to know the key reasons why people leave your organisation but can you tell whether there is any difference between the reasons top performers leave and the reasons mediocre performers leave? Another example comes from the old adage that "people join organisations and leave managers". This is largely (though not always) true. Are there enough questions about management quality to know if this is true for you, and if so, what to do about it? Exit-Info's interview devotes an entire section to thoroughly exploring the quality of management experienced by the Departer.

• The common wisdom is that the maximum number of questions that is acceptable for on-line surveys is around 70. In our experience, this is insufficient to gain high quality exit intelligence (remember at least 10 of the 70 will be taken up with demographic questions). We recommend you bear this in mind when choosing an exit interview service.

Some questions to help you assess this for yourself:

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QUALITY CONTROL

Consistency of data

Another critical problem with on-line surveys is that there is no check on the consistency or validity of responses. Exit-Info deliberately involves a human being in the exit interview process for this reason. They bring their common sense to the interview to check that we are getting a "straight story" for you.

If you are considering conducting your interviews internally, you need to ensure that all of your interviewers follow a tightly structured process to ensure rigour and consistency across interviews.

Some questions to help you assess this for yourself:

Getting honest views from Departers

Sometimes a Departer feels reluctant to tell the truth in an exit interview. This is a common reason why organisations decide to use external parties for this process. Even when using external providers, Departers may still be reluctant to tell the truth if their individual data is going to be reported, for example, to their manager. The common response is to give "middle of road" answers or to inflate them so that they don't "burn their bridges" with people in the organisation.

Exit-Info's Disclosure Control Process ensures that your organisation receives only accurate data by allowing Departers control over the disclosure of their Individual Report. If reporting their individual data means they are unwilling to be honest, they have the option of with-holding their Individual Report. That way the organisation still receives their (accurate!) data in any team or group reports they produce. While it is rare for Departers to with-hold their report, having the option gives them safety if they feel they need it.

A question to help you assess this for yourself:

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RESPONSE RATES

It is very important that a large proportion of Departers provide exit data otherwise the conclusions you draw are likely to be inaccurate.

1. It is very easy for someone to ignore an email asking them to fill in an on-line survey - especially if they are busy in their last few weeks on the job.
2. Some organisations do not have internet access for every employee. For example nurses in most hospitals do not have their own computer. Nor do many customer service people or manual workers.

Exit-Info addresses this issue by allocating interviews to particular Interviewers who are then responsible for following up with the Departer to ensure the interview is conducted. Sometimes they are even conducted after the Departer has left. At last count, our response rate was over 95%.

A question to help you assess this for yourself:

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INTELLIGENCE GAINED

There is a difference between data, information and intelligence. Data is the raw information that when combined and reported can give you information. However information in itself is not always useful. In choosing an exit interview provider you want to ensure you gain some "intelligence" about what is going on in your company. Exit-Info focuses on "actionable data" - that is, data that is transformed into information that provides intelligence on what action is needed.

For example from our experience we know that when people are asked about their reasons for leaving, they almost always give you a mix of real departure reasons and issues that they were unhappy with but that didn't necessarily CAUSE them to leave. Unless you separate the two, you may go and spend time and energy on initiatives that make people a bit happier but have little or no impact on staff turnover. Exit-Info uses a rigorous process to ensure you know which is which.

Every step of the way, we ask ourselves: does this help our client focus their limited resources on the initiatives that will have the biggest impact on staff turnover?

Conducting face-to-face exit interviews internally presents an important difficulty in this area which is that the data is frequently left on hand-written forms in the HR file. This means that the data can not be analysed and trends can not be identified. The interviewers often gain an understanding of the issues in their areas but there are two common problems with this:

• first, objective data analysis reveals different priorities than human memory which is affected by the recency and primacy effects as well as the salience of given issues at that point in time; and 
• secondly, the human memory (frequently belonging to an HR person) may leave the organisation at some point in the future which means that even this intelligence is lost.

Some questions to help you assess this for yourself:

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VALUE

The two key components in assessing whether a service is providing good value are cost and quality. For instance on-line surveys are usually cheap but they provide data of unreliable quality. Alternatively you can pay for face-to-face interviews but the quality improvement over phone interviews is unconvincing and unlikely to justify the cost.

When conducting interviews internally, a common error is the failure to fully cost the time taken. The time cost needs to be calculated for the following:

• the interviewer
• staff who perform data entry of the interview results
• staff who generate reports from the exit data
• time spent training interviewers and report generators
• the opportunity cost of HR not being available to do other more stategic work

Exit-Info offers a very reasonably priced service that provides high quality data, excellent response rates and intelligent, "actionable" insights.

Some questions to assess this for yourself:

All of the assessment questions presented above are summarised here in our Exit Interview Assessment Chart. Feel free to print it off and use it in assessing your own exit interview process (questions 1-18), or outsourced providers of exit services (questions 1-21).

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