Theresa,
I'm back with some points from an expert I know of, hope this helps you.
Do let me know if it did. :)
1] The main objective of conducting exit interviews is staff retention! If you are serious about retaining good people, then the more you know about why people chose to leave, the better.
2] If you regularly conduct exit interviews, compile and analyse the data. It can provide information about what sorts of people are leaving (e.g. age range, length of service, job function/department, reporting lines), and the reasons why they have left. It is then possible to design targeted programmes to address the issues that are leading to your key people leaving.
3] It is important to analyse the reasons for people leaving; are they preventable? Are they “healthy reasons” (e.g. personal development, travel), or “unhealthy” (e.g. problems with manager/supervisor, lack of development)? It is also good to analyse how many people come back after travel or parental leave – this is a good indicator that you are doing something right and have supportive policies in place. You should be also looking at how many people don’t come back after parental leave!
4] It is good to remember that some staff turnover is good – it brings in new ideas, new approaches. What you are trying to do with exit interview analysis is reduce preventable turnover and enhance the work environment/staff commitment.
5] It is important to think through how interviews are conducted and who does them - people are often nervous about providing their real reasons for leaving while they are still there, and there may be a reluctance to ‘burn the bridges’. It is also good for interviews to be conducted by a third party (e.g. HR) or manager once removed, rather than the immediate manager in case they are part of the problem and also to make the interview more ‘official,’ rather than a formality that has to be completed.
6] It is important to think about how to get the results of the interviews on the management agenda, as it should be part of regular monitoring and measurement of people. Sometimes management get defensive when presented with reasons for leaving - it can actually make someone feel a bit of a wimp if they secretly agree with the concerns, but don’t have the initiative to do something about it (like leave) or the results can be indicative of problems/issues within their own areas of responsibility. Who gets to see/read the exit interview data is important – it must be seen by people at the top. Lower levels may fudge it if the feedback reflects badly on them.
7] In addition to the traditional interview which takes place in the last few days we have found value in conducting a further interview about 3 months after the person has left – you are much more likely to get honest candid feedback. For example when we did this research for one organisation, we found the key reasons given when interviewed after they had left the organisation were supervisor-related, as opposed to the ‘more money’, ‘going overseas’, and ‘personal reasons’ given at the time of the in-house exit interview.
8] In the ideal world where we all work for great organisations, then measurement and interventions designed to retain good staff are put into place prior to people getting the huff and leaving for the wrong reasons, e.g. employee surveys and 360-degree feedback. But the exit interview provides one more source of information to check you are doing all the other things right – hopefully!
Well, all of the above was a combination of some good exit process, pre , post & the process itself.
A suggestion to maintain the above will be through an access or excel templates, with predifined reasons & having this form completed after each exit. Finaly through an access query you can pull up a report quarterly, i guess you can combine it on excel too with all avrage reasons and show it as a chart.
This is just a suggestion, am too young ( just 2 yrs ) in the HR industry to be a GURU :D
Have fun
Gayathri