If it’s time for your organization to get a better understanding of why employees leave, connect with us to learn more about how Work Institute can help.
Exit Interviews
Gathering the Data
Performing Exit Interviews
The methods used to gather employee feedback in the exit space matters. Multiple studies have shown that conducting Exit Interviews after an employee leaves and using a 3rd party changes the given reason for leaving 40%-63% of the time.
Most organizations do their exit surveys before the employees leave. Therefore, many employees are not honest about their true reasons for leaving. They may be concerned about references, last pay checks, or retaliation from their manager.
How We Help
To help our partners identify the real reasons why employees leave we use a high touch, deep dive approach to conducting Exit Interviews.
The key to getting high quality exit data is putting the former employee in control of the conversation. Utilizing the Voice of the Employee approach, our Exit Interviews allow interviewees to participate by web or in a live telephonic interview while they control the conversation. There is no better way to learn from someone than to listen to them share their thoughts and stories in their own words. Do not restrict their responses for the sake of convenience.
Our research center reaches out to your former employees after they exit the organization by phone six times over approximately six weeks at different times throughout the day to attempt to conduct an interview as well as use an email campaign to participate in the web-based interview. The former employee also has the option to call in to the research center at their convenience to complete the interview or schedule it at a time that works best for them.
In both the web-based and telephonic formats, we go beyond simple ratings and multiple-choice questions by conducting intentional and conversational interviews with your former employees.
Our mixed methodology approach of collecting both quantitative and qualitative data allow employees to highlight what they deem important in their own words, providing the detail needed to act in specific areas in specific ways.
Once the interview is complete, our researchers code and categorize the responses to enable them to be measured and capture themes in different levels of the data.
The Proof
Parkview Health partnered with Work Institute and identified five of their hospital units that required more specialized nurses and had higher turnover rates than other parts of the organization. The specificity of the data from Work Institute’s exit interviews informed multiple interventions including:
- Building out a nursing career ladder
- Partnering with local university to provide increased tuition assistance
- Strategically removing several poor nurse managers as well as
- Realignment of some personnel to ensure adequate supervision
- Revamped the orientation & onboarding process
These efforts reduced turnover between 11% and 34% across the included departments. Meaningful change starts with quality data.
- The onboarding process needed to be improved
- Leadership needed to be realigned in specific areas to be able to better retain nurses
Based on these key findings, changes were implemented that resulted in a 33% increase in “Excellent” ratings for onboarding, 36% decreases in “Poor” ratings for onboarding, and an overall 36% decrease in First Year Nursing Turnover. View the case study in its entirety here: Parkview Health case study