Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Conducting Employee Exit Surveys
When you think about it realistically, conducting employee exit surveys can be make or break when it comes to moving forward from an employee leaving your business. That’s because the true cost of replacing someone who works for you can be substantial.
In order to ensure you can keep your company turnover as low as possible and therefore reduce how much you spend on the hiring process; employee exit surveys are essential. They help you to gain a true understanding of your company’s culture. They also help you to see where you may be lacking in your business, what you’re doing well, and how you can improve to better retain employees in the future.
Here are our best tips and things you want to know about conducting employee exit surveys!
Review Individual Employee Exit Surveys First
As a part of the offboarding process, you should get employees to complete an exit survey. This important survey can help you obtain feedback from them and learn about their experience working for your business.
Once you have collected this feedback, you can review it and determine if it should be shared with other employees. Such as the departing employee’s manager or supervisor.
If an employee is to provide feedback that appears to be opposite from how the experience was observed by yourself or other employees, then it may require some attention. This process can provide clarity around certain situations and understanding around why an employee may be choosing to leave.
Counter to this, positive feedback on certain experiences can tell you that certain practices should be adopted in other parts of the company.
Categorization is Key
Certain survey platforms will give you the option to organize your collected results into categories. Categorization can help you to highlight the experiences of a range of employees and highlight any common statements or survey answers.
If employees who are leaving on bad terms are giving low ratings, it could be simply due to poor performance. On the other hand, those who are leaving on good terms and are giving low ratings could be because of problems in the company.
If you find there are major differences between those leaving on good vs. bad terms, you could filter your results in order to see only certain results. It’s important to explore all possibilities.
Reviewing Collective Survey Results
Looking at your survey results collectively can help you to gain certain insights. Some platforms will even allow you to gain access to more detailed analytics based on your results.
When looking at your results collectively, consider what your company did well and what could be improved. Consider the overall experience of those employees who exited and what matters most to them.
At the end of the day, you want to focus on what can be done to increase employee retention in the future. Try comparing themes between questions in order to observe patterns and make important connections between answers.
Finding Your Strengths and Opportunities
One of the best things about conducting employee exit surveys is finding your strengths and opportunities. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as observing the positive feedback from your surveys and then considering improvements afterwards.
Take a look at your survey answers and make note of the positive feedback that comes through. The interesting things about surveys is they usually focus on constructive feedback or things that you can improve on. Positive feedback in these surveys shows your true strengths so be sure to take a second to reflect on what you’ve done well.
After you have looked at the positives, take a look at what you could be doing better. These should be seen as new opportunities for what you could improve on.
Taking the Next Step
After you’ve taken a thorough look at all of your collected feedback, decide on what areas to focus on. That could mean focusing on your lowest scoring items and if there is something you could have done to keep exiting employees.
Establishing themes among your data is a good way to take the next step in understanding your organization’s health and if there is a group that has particularly positive responses. There are tons of different ways to learn and therefore grow as a business.
Once you know what it is you want to ask your exiting employees in their surveys and how you might approach looking at the data, you will want to have a platform on your side to help. Polling software is a convenient, on-demand way to gather real-time feedback, data, and information from an audience.
Not only is it a useful tool for conducting employee exit surveys, it can be used for a variety of businesses, presentations, functions, events, and more. Be sure to read all about it on our handy FAQ page!
