Even if your company might be the dream corporation for many, you still will see people leaving your corporation. Asking the right exit interview questions can bring the truest data about the organization that can help you improve more. Let’s see the top 15+ exit interview questions below that can come to your help.
Whether the departing employee was happy with the position or not, you should always keep cordial relations with them. To maintain this relationship, an exit interview can be the chance to have a different perspective of the company from a genuine viewpoint. This session will also help you to learn about the workplace culture that you are having currently.
Many organizations hire business development professionals to assess the company and give essential feedback to improve the organization. But if you are able to ask the correct sets of exit interview questions to your former employees in the exit interview session, it will do almost the same thing for you.
Exit Interview Session: What Is It & When To Conduct It?
Generally, an exit interview session happens between the employee who is willingly leaving the company and the human resource personnel or the manager of the company. In this meeting, the HR personnel can ask questions that are relevant to the company’s improvement and overall feedback from the employees.
When you are the manager or the owner of a company, you will not be micromanaging your business all the time. And most cases, what employees are going through handling the work pressure, work culture, or any other issues, you will not be able to learn about that. During an exit interview, it’s your chance to learn insights about your workplace.
Do you really need to run an exit interview session with all the employees who are leaving your company? Not really. When you are firing someone and making someone leave your company for any issue, you do not need any exit interview questions for them. This session should be a constructive meeting.
Do You Need To Prepare Exit Interview Questions?
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 25% of company turnover happened due to voluntary job switching. However, taking the time to speak with a departing employee to learn more about their experiences to help you do so politely and prevent problems from developing to the point where you end up losing some of your best employees. It’s essential to keep in mind that team members are not mandated by law to engage in exit interview sessions.
You can therefore urge them to do so, but it is ultimately up to them if they decide not to. But refrain from attempting to contact former workers again in order to obtain additional information from them. So the question remains, do you need to be prepared for it? Of course, you do.
15+ Exit Interview Questions That Can Improve Your Company
An exit interview question session can be nerve-wrenching if you do not conduct it properly with the departing employee. You have to be more professional and conscious at the same time while you are dealing with someone. Instead of attempting to think of exit employee questions off the top of your head or in response to anything they’ve said, try to be as objective and prepared as you can with a template or checklist that you can follow like a script.
As part of the offboarding process, send your questionnaire or template to the employee by email if you are unable to meet with them in person. Let’s look at some of the most beneficial questions you may ask if you’re not sure where to begin.
In General Questions You Can Ask Your Employees
When you are getting started with the general exit employee questions, you can easily set the tone of the meeting more casual yet informative. Let’s see what kind of questions you can ask your departing employee.
1. Why Have You Decided To Resign From This Position?
This question can be a personal question, yet you will get a gist of their perspective. For example, when you are asking this question, they might dig into the professional experience that they had in your company or the work culture that they could not comprehend. They might shed some light on if their role compelled them to grow professionally or not. So this is the first and most important step to getting started with the session.
2. What Distinguishes The Prospective Role From The Earlier One?
You can learn to appreciate and be mindful of what others have to offer by asking this question. You can then see what needs to be improved. You can also inquire about the benefits they will receive if they are moving to new employment with a different business. It will also inform you of any changes that need to be made to the facilities for your employees.
3. Which Part Did You Like About Your Former Position?
During the offboarding time of an employee, you can ask the departing employee how their experience was overall. They will definitely have some good moments along with bad experiences. So they can pinpoint which part they actually enjoyed. In that way, you will know what good things you are offering that are favorable to your employees. Later on, you can focus on these and highlight them while standing out in the job market.
4. Do You Think You Got The Right Tools At Work?
You can check to see if your employees are using the proper tools while at work. Additionally, it will demonstrate how competent they are at their jobs and show you exactly where you should work as a business owner. In addition to getting their responses, you may ask them for ideas on how to make the work tools better.
5. Do You Think Your Supervisors Gave Rooms To Grow?
This question must be asked in order to comprehend the relationship between a leader and an employee. Of course, there will be differences in how people interact at work and conflicts will always arise. However, if you question a departing employee about their experiences working for this company, they will know the strengths that you, as the owner, should focus on. If it’s practicable, you should establish formal training for the employees based on the information gathered. This is a technique to make the workplace better as it should be.
6. Which Part Compelled You To Apply For The New Job?
This might be a light-hearted farewell query that reveals what employees often anticipate from a job role. You can ask them to clarify their perspective. Additionally, you can make notes so that you can later, after a clear observation of the entire scenario, recruit qualified and ideal individuals for your own firm.
Exit Interview Questions Related To Company Culture & Development
The next step is to ask the right company-related exit interview questions. Asking about the journey and the overall experience is one thing. Learning about the company from a granular level is more fruitful to know your own company. So let’s see which type of exit interview questions you can easily ask your employees.
7. Do Our Training Align With Your Career Goals?
This question is very technical if you think about it. By asking this question, you are making the person talk about the entire office journey he or she had with you and address the learnings at once. So, you can expect the person to talk about their career goals first and then demonstrate if your company helped him to grow as a person to achieve that goal. This data will help you to sort out which kind of people are looking for related goals and how you should prepare the program for them.
8. What Other Initiatives Did You Take For Being Skilled?
This is yet another excellent exit interview question to learn what others are doing to stay afloat in this job environment. This means that you will precisely know which skills make the employee stand out when they eventually change jobs and join a different organization. As a result, you will have more work on your hands and will know to hunt for similar talents in the next recruit.
9. Do You Think You Had Better Work-Life Balance?
You can learn a lot about your employee’s personal priorities and any potential problems, such as excessive work hours or a lack of flexibility, because of how they respond to this topic. In this way, you can also give some attention to the working hours. Many companies now prefer to start at 7 am in the morning to give a better work-life balance to their employees. You can also introduce something like that if feasible.
10. Can You Describe The Work Environment Of This Company?
When you ask this question to every departing employee of your company, you will see a certain pattern in their replies. From all of these answers, you will learn if you should improve your work environment or not. Not only just the arena but also the relationships between different levels of employees should be maintained.
11. Do You Think Everyone Is Appreciated For Their Work Here?
Find out whether or not your employees feel appreciated at work and elsewhere. This is important since it might affect how well they perform at work as well. The best version of their coworkers will emerge when their seniors, supervisors, or managers show appreciation for them.
12. What Qualities Should Your Replacement Possess?
It’s possible that a lot has changed since the departing employee was hired. You can get a sense of the hard and soft abilities you need to fill the role from this question. It demonstrates your respect for the interviewee’s viewpoint and abilities, even if they are going to depart the organization.
Wrap Up Exit Interview Questions You May Ask To Departing Employees
When you have come to the end of this discussion, you should address some of the most common and obvious exit interview questions. This will help you to wrap up the exit interview session gracefully.
13. Were The Office Benefits Good Enough For You?
The incentives for joining or quitting any firm in the modern world are the work advantages. So it is possible for you to inquire about this topic so that you can provide more beneficial benefits. Examine the office perks and consider enhancing them to motivate employees.
14. Which Aspect Did You Expect To Be Changed In This Office?
This question is an open question, that really shows which part of the office was bothering the employees the most. It can be a mere office practice, office utility, or anything. You should consider what the departing employees are saying and based on that you can work on changing things in your office.
15. Do You Want To Bring A Replacement For Your Role?
This question’s primary objective is to determine whether the respondent is interested in making referrals to this company. It will also reveal whether they think highly of this company. In that scenario, you can ask follow-up exit interview questions about it. The focus of their response will then be on how strongly they truly think their peers should join this particular company.
16. What Might We Have Done Differently?
It’s almost guaranteed that there are at least a few things that could be improved, even if your departing employees are doing so for entirely reasonable reasons and respect their time spent working with you. That’s a very another scenario if employees are quitting because they believe your business is horrible. In any case, this query should help you identify the areas where you need to make improvements.
