I have a tale of two clients, same size, both, uh, sat between around 25 and 40 employees. They had the same turnover level: 1 to 3 people leaving per quarter, every quarter, like clockwork. So on paper they were really identical companies from an HR standpoint. One of them, though, had an engagement survey score that was climbing. Every time we did an engagement survey, that score was going up. And the other one had an engagement survey score that had been flat or dropping for 2 years. Same headcount, same turnover rate, same exit interviews happening every single time someone left. But yet, in engagement, in morale, completely different outcomes. The difference isn't that data; both companies have the same data. The difference is what happens to it after it's collected. And that is this whole episode. This is The HR Connection. I'm Sabrina Baker, founder of Acacia HR Solutions. This show is for the people doing HR in companies too small to have an entire department for it: the practitioner wearing five hats, the operations leader who inherited HR because nobody else would, the founder who's realizing HR isn't optional anymore just because the company is small. Small business HR isn't scaled down enterprise HR; it is its own discipline, and that's what we talk about here. Today, very specifically, I am talking exit interviews. I want to share why running them, having exit interviews, isn't the same as having a functioning exit process, and how to tell the difference before it costs you another good employee for the same reason as the last one. So let's talk about a pattern that I see over and over and over, right? Fifteen years of fractional HR support, and here's something I see over and over: a client wants exit interviews. Fine. Absolutely. We can do exit interviews. We run them. We have the exit interview. We do these, uh, face to face. And when I say face to face, for us I mean computer screen to computer screen. We write up the feedback. We send it over. And at a certain kind of company, that's the entire life cycle of that data. It gets read. Maybe it gets discussed a little bit. And then? Nothing. No trace of it in a decision six months later. Nothing. At another kind of company, same size, same turnover, that exit data gets reviewed on a cycle. Every 90 days we summarize it, and it comes with an action plan. Not, "Here's what people said," but, "Here's what people said, and here's what we're changing because of it." The mistake with exit interviews, I think, is treating them as more of a compliance ritual, as something you need to do to check the box. Uh, something because it's good practice, or it feels responsible. Instead of something that is going to be really useful data for you to improve the workforce, for the people who are still there. Collected and filed is not the same as collected and used. If the data isn't functioning, if it's not actually changing things, then you don't have an exit interview process; you have an exit interview habit. And the expensive part of just having a habit is that the same reasons for leaving show up again. Same complaint, different employee, 18 months later. I guarantee you you've had this happen potentially. You paid for that data once. You sat down and you got the feedback from an exiting employee. And if you don't do anything with it, you're going to pay for the same problem again in turnover because nobody is closing this loop. There are three questions that tell you whether your exit interview process functions, it's working, you're doing something with it, or whether it's just performative. The three questions are: Are people actually telling you the truth? Is that truth reaching the people who can act on it in a way that they actually will absorb? And has anything ever changed because of it? We're going to walk all through all three of these, and once you understand the reasoning for these questions, and you ask yourself and give an honest answer, you'll know exactly where and if your exit interview process is broken. Because it's almost in one of these three areas, but definitely not all at once. Most companies, when we walk through these three questions, they're maybe doing one or two, right? But then there's one that is the hiccup. There's one that turns this into a habit and not an actual functioning process. So let's break each one of them down. All right, question number one is: Are they telling you the truth? Now, of course, there's no full proof way to know whether they're telling you the truth or not. But you can do some things to make sure you are setting it up to where they feel most comfortable being completely honest. And I think that the biggest lever here for honesty is format. If you just send an exit interview form, that's going to get you a very safe version. It's going to get you, if you do multiple choice, you'll have a few open text boxes, submit. If they have time and even fill it out properly, it's going to produce answers that people think are acceptable to put in writing. Whatever they feel comfortable putting in writing, that's what you're going to get. Nobody wants to be quoted. Nobody wants their exact words sitting in a file that a manager might read later. Um, in a small business, everybody knows everybody. The departing employee might still run into that manager at the grocery store, or, uh, you know, they might still be running in the same circles, network circles. So you just have to be really careful. And so people are not going to put things in writing that could come back to bite them later. So face to face, as I said, we do everything face to face, which, again, for us, because we're remote, is like screen to screen. I still consider that face to face because you can read body language, you can, uh, understand tone a little bit better. But I find that that gets you something different. It gets you a very different answer in an exit interview than just a form. And it's not because people love confrontation, or they love being able to answer these, some- sometimes these uncomfortable questions to a person. It's because a conversation lets someone hedge a little bit. It lets you qualify the question, or them qualify their answers. It allows both of you to read the room in real time. They can say harder things more softly, directly to someone than they can in a form, right? They can say something like, "It wasn't really about the workload. It was more that I never felt like my manager had my back." You're more than likely to get that out of a person looking at you face to face than you are to get that on a form. You want to be under able to understand tone. You want to be able to understand, um, you know, be able to ask more questions. If you send a form, their answers are it. That's all you got. But if you are face to face with them and you ask a question, that may, just like in an interview, lead to another question and a deeper dive, and allow you to really get valuable data and feedback that's not just a multiple choice yes/no/maybe that you have no idea what any of those means. The second piece of this is who conduct it matters as well. So when we think about, "Are they telling the truth?" first, I think setting them up to be honest should happen with a face-to-face exit interview. And then, of course, we have to think about who the right person is to conduct the interview. Obviously, it cannot be their manager. Um, and it also really shouldn't be the most senior person in the organization. I have had well-meaning founders want to conduct every exit interview with people leaving their team, and I just have to say, "Stop it." Like, they're not probably going to be super honest with you about your business that you look at as your baby, as one of your children. They're not going to tell you that this place is a shit show if it is. So knock it off with the senior leaders conducting exit interviews. I don't I just don't think that that is a really good strategy. You want to really think about who the right person is. Now, of course, in most organizations it's human resources. Um, our clients have us do it, I think, because we're kind of like a hybrid situation where, yes, we are HR, and yes, we are the company's HR, but because we're fractional, and employees know that. They know that we are not on payroll, we are not, um, you know, fellow employees like they are. We are contractors. That makes them feel a little bit safer. It makes them feel like we truly are more of an independent third party. And so a lot of times in an organization, I think it's fine if it's somebody on the HR team, as long as HR has the reputation of being unbiased. Um, if there is any kind of feelings in your organization that HR cannot be unbiased, that HR is, of course, not your friend and only there for the company, like we hear so often, but if there's anything that's happened that's really perpetuated that, then people probably aren't going to be honest with you in exit interviews. But for the most part, I think that that HR can handle the exit interviews and hopefully make people feel like this information really is data for us. It's data that we're going to try to improve upon for the people who are still here. And so we need you to, uh, or we would like for you to be honest so that we can get to a really good place. I don't think the interviewer always has to be the same person. Um, and I know, again, in a in a small environment this is a little tricky, but I think that you should match the interviewer to what will make this specific person comfortable telling the truth. So thinking about that, right? So if you, as HR, have had a run-in with this person, then maybe you're not the right person to conduct that interview. I I don't think it's a bad idea to have somebody else in the org do it. Maybe a leader that they never interacted with, that they don't feel like is a senior leader, that's going to really kind of come down on them, or they're having to tell a founder about their business. I think it's it's okay to have it be somebody else in the organization who they feel like can be unbiased. And again, I do think sometimes this is where a third party can be really helpful, um, just because then that third party truly has no, you know, dog in that race. They they are just trying to collect data. And so sometimes people will feel way more comfortable sharing with a third party. And then the last piece of this, and how do you make sure that that exiting employees are comfortable telling the truth, is that you have to think about what happened the last time somebody gave honest feedback. We are in a very small environment, usually, and so word gets around fast, right? In a in a small business, I always say small businesses are like small towns. Everybody's in everybody's business. If the last person who said something critical watched it go nowhere, or they watched it get treated as a personal attack, then the next person walks in already guarding their answers. And please don't be naive enough to think that when your employee leaves, they don't talk to anybody in your organization ever again. So if you have exit data, or somebody says something on their way out, even though they're gone, if you are being defensive about that feedback, or if it is known that you didn't take it seriously, then somebody else may be telling them about it. And it and regardless of whether they tell them about it or not, it sets the tone for everybody staying, that, "Oh, they don't really care about our feedback. They're just being performative with their with their questions." So people have to believe that candor is safe and worth their time. They they have to believe that they can be honest, and that that's going to be, um, a safe space to be able to do so, and that their feedback is actually going to be valued and done something with. So here's a diagnostic for this question. Remember, the question is, "Are they comfortable telling you the truth?" And the diagnostic for this is to pull your last five exit interviews. If every single one reads really clean, there's no friction, there's nothing specific, nothing that would make a manager uncomfortable, I doubt that you actually have five happy departures. You definitely have a format problem, or you have a mismatched person problem. There's something. Real turnover has real reasons. And if your data doesn't reflect that, then people may not be telling you the truth. They're telling you what's safe. Okay, so question number two, to see if your exit interviews are a functioning process or just a habit, is, "Is it reaching decision makers in a way that lands?" And this is probably the hardest one. You know, as HR practitioners, we have to figure out how to navigate sharing feedback in a way that people can hear it. I always say that you can be giving the best feedback in the world. You can be so right with everything that you are saying. But if you are not saying it in a way that people can hear it, it doesn't matter. It goes nowhere. And this is absolutely true when we are reading out engagement survey feedback or exit interview feedback, that we have to figure out how to say it in a way that it lands so that the decision makers will actually make change based on it. So let's say you did the exit interview, it worked, you got the real answer, somebody was very honest with you, they gave you absolute feedback. How do you deliver that then back to your leaders? So first, I will tell you that a written report gets skimmed. That's not necessarily a criticism of any particular leader. It's just how written reports get consumed these days. We have the attention spans of a gnat, and we are not going to sit and read a lengthy written report. So it goes to an inbox, it gets a glance, maybe it gets forwarded, and the specific uncomfortable detail that mattered most gets lost in some kind of bullet point. So this is another one where we say, "Do it face to face." Face to face delivery forces a reaction in the room. When you are presenting feedback directly to a leadership team, you can watch which finding lands and which one gets glossed over. Even if they don't say anything, you can usually read it on their face. You can push on the thing they're trying to wave off, the thing they're trying to dismiss. And you can ask them right then and there, "We've now heard this from three people. What are we going to do about it?" And then you will get an answer. And if that answer is silence, that silence actually tells you something too. In these meetings, I understand that what is going to happen is defensiveness. It's this is where defensiveness will show up the hardest. And it's worth really calling that out instead of trying to work around it. When feedback about leadership or management style comes back from an exit interview, the instinct in the room is to explain it away. It's to definitely blame the person, right? They had other issues. They were already checked out. They never listened. That's not really what happened. And some of that may be true. Absolutely. There's always two sides to a story. So the manager may have valid points, but the job in that meeting isn't to relegate one departure. It's to notice the pattern across departures. And this is why I always encourage not necessarily giving exit interview feedback after every single turnover, but to do it cumulatively. Or if you're going to do it after every single turnover, do it, but say, "Let's let's look at a pattern after 90 days or six months," depending on how high your turnover is, how long you need to get like five, six people in the report. Let's let's look at a pattern here, because it's hard to make changes or, uh, get anybody on board with doing anything for a one-off. So let's make sure we don't have a one-off here. Let's collect some data. So you want to be able to combat the defensiveness with saying, "This is not just one person. This is five people now who have said this exact same thing. Five people can't be misunderstanding. Five people can't have some other story. Five people is a pattern that we cannot explain away." One person's complaint might be an anecdote, but the same complaint from a third person, fourth person, that is a finding that we need to treat as fact. Your job delivering this data isn't to win an argument. And it's not to, um, you know, have a gotcha moment or an aha moment or a, "Hey, you guys need to get your shit together moment," which I think is sometimes, I'm going to be honest, how HR can come across. It is just to make sure that the finding, the data survives the meeting, that it doesn't get dismissed, that it is a absolute decision point, and we need to keep talking about it or or figure out what we're going to do about it. So sharing something like three of the last four exits cited lack of growth conversations with their manager, that's a sentence that should follow, uh, that should end up on a follow-up document with a name attached to it and a date to revisit it, right? This is an agenda item that we're going to keep talking about until we understand how do we fix that. What do we do about it? What is the game plan here so that our next exit interview doesn't say the same thing? All right, question three, uh, to determine if your exit interview process is a functioning process or just a habit is, has anything ever changed? Have we legitimately changed something based on an exit interview? And when I opened this podcast, I told you about my two clients, same turnover, same company size, same exit interview process. One of them has climbing engagement numbers from the employees who stayed, one of them does not. And this right here is what separates those two clients. It is the one question that really cuts through any other excuse we can possibly have about this. If you go back to your exit interviews that you've done, can you name something that was changed because of that data? Can you say, "We saw this in exit interviews, and we did something about it." Not just we discussed it, not just we acknowledged it, but we changed it. Whether it be a policy, a process, a manager training, a benefit, a compensation issue, whatever it is, you can say, "Yep, I can draw the correlation between we were getting this in exit interview data, and now we changed this, and now we don't get it anymore." That's not our issue in exit interview data. If your answer is no, if you have no concrete examples with exit interviews to change, your exit interview process doesn't really function. It is absolutely just a habit, no matter how good the interviews are themselves. So maybe you get employees to feel comfortable and they tell you the truth. Maybe you're great at giving the feedback to managers, and they listen to you, and they don't get defensive, but then nothing changes. We don't have a functioning process. It's still just a habit because it dies at the feedback portion. The whole goal of doing exit interviews is to understand what made someone take their time away from their current work to go search something else, seek out something else, go through the interview process, go through the offer process, think about changing jobs. Let's think about that. This is a big moment in somebody's life. People at certain levels do not just change jobs on a whim. This is a big could be a big change for them. It could change their benefits. It could change maybe they have to move. There's all kinds of things that could go into it. They're losing their seniority for time off and other things. So there's there's this a big decision. Your exit interview is to talk to them about what went into that decision that you can affect change on. There's maybe some things that went into the decision that you can't affect change on at all. But if there are things that went into the decision that you can affect change on, why collect the data if you're not going to affect the change? Why do that? You're wasting everybody's time. It's better to just not even do them. There is, uh, a really important distinction here. I just want to say it again, that you're not looking for a single departing employee, right, to redesign your company. I I don't like it when we try to make changes off of a one-off, or we try to especially big overhauls off of one person's piece of feedback. If you have low turnover, and so it's going to be hard for you to get, you know, five, six people's worth of exit interview data that you collate over five, six months, whatever, um, and you think that you've had somebody leave, you think they give you valid feedback, you think, "Hey, this is something that, um, they're definitely saying that I think is true," I would then go validate it with the people that work there still. So you you can't wait for the next exit interview because you have low turnover. That could be a year for you, which is fantastic. Um, but you feel like it's feedback that you really do need to share and do something about, but it's only from one person, then you can go and try and validate it with people who are still internal to the organization. So this is when we would say run an engagement survey, a poll survey around that one question, um, have some focus groups. This is when we would say dig into it a little bit more, not in a big dramatic way, but just to try to validate that data. You you can't rescope things based off one person's feedback. So you do have to be really careful with that. Um, but when you have like three exit interviews in a row mentioning the same thing, that's no longer an anecdote. That's absolutely something that you have to look into. That's your validation. So the the the problem that I see a lot of times in small businesses, because we they are so small, is that one person will say one thing and we'll just run with it. We will go and we will run with it and we will try to do all this stuff to fix or make better that one thing, but we need to really validate that that's just not one person's thoughts or one person's opinion. Let's make sure that we're we're validating it. That's why I really like the the 90-day accumulation that we do with clients where we, you know, give them all the exit interview data over the last 90 days or six months even. But I understand that some small businesses don't have high turnover. Like if this were my business, I lose maybe one person a year, maybe some years none. So it would be difficult for me to collate multiple people, um, in a short amount of time. So if that's you, just find some other way to make sure that we're validating it and that we're not just running wild with one person's feedback, that we're we really are getting it validated, that this truly is a problem. If you go back to my two clients, right, same size, same turnover, the one with the climbing engagement score, they have a clear answer to when was the last time something changed. We could absolutely line out what has changed because of exit interview data. So let me give you a very real, uh, example. They adjusted so early on, uh, probably actually the first time that we ran this process, they've been with us for many years, the first time we ran this process with them, um, and I gave them I think it was six months at that time worth of exit interview data. I would say six out of seven exit interviews said that the PTO approval process was awful. There was so much friction in it. It was just, uh, really hard to request time off. They didn't feel like they could ever really take time off because, uh, their managers made them feel bad about it. And then just the whole, like, approval process wasn't clear and it was just hard to do. And so because we had six out of seven exit interviews, that's real data. And so we were able to go in and change that approval process and do some more training with managers around let's not make people feel bad about taking the time off we give them. And, and, uh, it we stopped seeing that. We we did not hear that feedback again in exit interviews about the PTO process. And so they have very clear lines between we got this in exit interviews and this is what we did about it. The other client who has the same headcount, same turnover data, same exit interview process, it's hard to get them to make change. It's hard for us to get them to make any kind of change. And their engagement scores are dropping. They they are either stagnant or dropping and people are, you know, leaving and saying the same things. And it's a little bit slower for them. It's a little bit harder to get them to make these changes. And so that is the difference. We have the same input in both of those, but one process functions as it should and it actually affects real change and the other one just doesn't. And the company is suffering because of it from a morale standpoint. So there you go. Three questions. You can run this audit in your own company in under 10 minutes. I am a big believer in exit interviews. I do not believe every employee needs an exit interview. I think circumstances demand, um, or determine whether an employee gets an exit interview. I don't think that it's something you absolutely have to run with every single employee. Um, and certainly not, you know, terminated employees. But I do think that it can give you valuable data if people are honest, if you have a mechanism to give that feedback in a way that it's going to land, and if you're actually going to affect change with it, if you're actually going to make changes. If you're not, then you really are just wasting people's time. So run this audit on your last five exit interviews or so. See if any of them, um, you know, actually affected change. See if you feel like people were being honest. If you're using a form only, think about that. Think about whether that's really helpful. I get it in much larger organizations, but for most of you listening, I know that you are in a smaller organization, um, and a form is probably not giving you what you need. And the time spent on conducting an exit interview, or again, you know, this is something you could use for actional support for, but, um, the time spent on conducting exit interviews, if you're getting real data that's going to help you make the workplace stronger, then it's so worth that time. It absolutely is. Collecting the data is never the hard part, actually. It's the acting on it that is. And, um, I think that this is a great place where you can collect data. Going right into this engagement surveys, I think, you know, we think in in a small environment, we think we know what employees are thinking or feeling. Um, and I'll tell you how many times I have been surprised by exit data or engagement survey data because what I thought I knew was not true. And so I do think I'm a a big believer in these things and doing engagement surveys and doing exit interviews because I think it can get you some really good feedback and data, but only if you do something with it. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.