TL;DR: High staff turnover can cost your business a lot of money and damage company culture. And you might be investing in initiatives to improve employee engagement, but your people may still leave. And why? Employee exit surveys are your best way to find that out. By exploring this powerful tool, organizations can uncover reasons behind turnover and gain valuable insights into avoiding more losses.
Forward-thinking companies care about voluntary employee turnover. And it’s easy to see why: High turnover is an absolute culture killer. And it costs companies a lot of money — you’ll spend between half and two times an employee’s annual salary just to replace them.
As people rethink priorities and have more remote job opportunities, companies must come to grips with the fact that turnover will escalate (even if you don’t see it in your organization yet). And one key strategy to reduce turnover and improve your company culture is often forgotten: employee exit surveys.
Many businesses run employee exit surveys and interviews, but don’t make the best use of these offboarding tools. As with exit interviews, exit surveys must be thought through to generate actionable insights that can help reduce staff turnover. And collecting data for the sake of it won’t help you — in fact, it can make your people more frustrated. But when designed and analyzed thoughtfully, exit surveys are strategic opportunities.
Employee exit surveys have the potential to provide valuable data on your company culture, management, communications, structures, processes… You name it. And if your company has a psychological safety issue, you may not be getting the full picture with engagement surveys alone.
Exit surveys can also help you to:
Keep reading to find out exactly how to run an employee exit survey and access our list of best-practice questions — or download the employee exit survey template now if you’d prefer. 😉
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Whenever an employee decides to leave the business, use this playbook to gather information about their experience working at the company.
However, beyond being a fundamental process each time an employee quits, this playbook should be an ongoing initiative in your company. The purpose is to continuously analyze the data surfaced in employee exit surveys (and interviews, if you choose to add that to your process), discussing and implementing actions for organizational improvement.
You clearly already have that — otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this playbook!
Consider setting up a system to run your company’s surveys better. Besides running exit surveys, it’s a best practice to explore engagement surveys, pulse surveys, and diversity surveys to improve your business while establishing a culture of transparency and dialogue. Although you can use paper, PDFs, or decentralized survey tools, a platform like Leapsome can help you with analytics and guarantee your employees’ privacy, multiplying the benefits of running surveys.
Given the sensitive nature of this type of survey (both in terms of content and the context that triggers them), you should not catch your employees by surprise. And letting your soon-to-be former employees know that you’ll send out an exit survey (and possibly schedule an exit interview or two) is not enough. As improving your organization is one of the primary goals of running exit surveys (and taking action), your people should know about this process from the get-go.
Consider announcing the new type of survey in your company’s all-hands meeting or team standup. Then, send out an email or Slack message with more details on the purpose of employee exit surveys and the processes involved. It would be even better to include this in your company’s employee handbook or other documentation accessible to all.
Once these surveys have become part of your company culture, make sure that new joiners are also aware of exit surveys. If your organization values transparency, all offboarding steps should be part of your onboarding documentation. Also, you’ll be communicating that you care about their thoughts and continuously improving as an employer.
Knowing that well-thought exit surveys and actions for development are part of your company’s DNA will motivate more people to complete their exit surveys. And remember: How you offboard someone is the only shot you have to turn your former team member into an advocate.
This is likely the trickiest part of setting up this type of survey. But as always, we’ve got your back! Download our free pack with best-practice questions to choose from for employee exit surveys.
Things to consider when choosing questions:
Key topics to approach in an employee exit survey are:
With an advanced people management platform with survey capabilities, you can automate employee exit surveys to be sent X days before their last day at the job.
To create the ideal timeline for your company, consider the following:
Don’t be forceful, and remember that you (and not the respondent) have the most to gain from exit surveys. Be appreciative of their contribution and send a few friendly reminders via email, chat, or your survey tool.
This is a great chance to dive deeper into topics that were already relevant, but not a good fit for the survey’s standard questions.
Decide who should conduct this interview (i.e., someone from People Ops/HR or the person’s soon-to-be former manager) and be mindful of your employee’s privacy. Don’t put them in a difficult situation. For instance, if someone reveals that the reason they left was a bad relationship with their manager, don’t tell this to the manager before their interview. There are other ways you can share feedback with a manager and support them in improving without compromising someone’s trust.
As more people respond to your company’s exit survey, you’ll have more consolidated data that might help you spot trends that weren’t so clear before. Working with exit survey data to improve the employee experience and increase employee retention is not a one-time thing.
Implementing a survey that doesn’t spark change is just lip service and not a good employer branding idea. Whether you’re running engagement surveys, pulse surveys, diversity surveys, or exit surveys (hopefully, you’ll run all of those!), you’re not collecting data just to have fancy graphs.
Consider scheduling recurring meetings with other stakeholders — these can be C-level executives, founders, people ops colleagues, or other people interested in supporting these initiatives. Have a clear agenda, share positives and negatives from exit survey data, and brainstorm solutions and changes.
And don’t try to focus on multiple topics at once. Work on a few areas for improvement at a time, starting with the most critical. Usually, those will be issues pertaining to the lowest scores or most negative sentiment analysis.
As an example, you might find out that many people left because of a lack of career opportunities and progression. Here, focus on creating development frameworks for your company’s various departments, with transparent information and average timelines to achieve the next level.
Transparent communication drives engagement, and that includes sharing the good and the bad. Although sharing the results of every meeting and discussion on exit survey analysis would likely be tiring for all, consider sharing a roundup with trends and, most importantly, initiatives and results of these actions. You can do this in an all-hands meeting, or you can share a simple presentation with simple graphs and key points with your people, making it clear that you’re happy to answer questions that may arise.
⭐️ Would you like to explore surveys to their full potential? Make sure to check out our other step-by-step playbooks on how to create and run different types of employee survey (as well as how to turn them into action). And don’t forget to download your free pack of employee exit survey questions. 💡
Leapsome is the only platform that closes the loop between performance management, employee engagement, and learning.
Watch this video to learn about running smooth and insightful employee exit surveys using Leapsome.
You should communicate constructive feedback to supervisors after reviewing aggregate survey results, but you must do it thoughtfully — especially if few people have left the company since you implemented the exit survey. Don’t share full responses that might reveal someone’s identity or sensitive information that a departing employee wouldn’t want to be known by their former supervisor.
Yes. However, until you have a bigger pool of respondents, be extra careful with sharing information with managers and other employees — especially qualitative data.
Be mindful that, until several people have filled out exit surveys, it might be possible to guess the origin of responses. The best practice here? Treat former colleagues as you would like to be treated; don’t try to identify respondents and don’t jeopardize anonymity (and the trust your people put in the process).
Employee exit surveys should become an integral part of your offboarding process and your company’s DNA. And this should be documented and presented to all employees and new joiners. Additionally, running other types of surveys is very important for your business, for retention, and for building a feedback culture that will make it natural for your people to engage in surveys.
Learn how Leapsome can automate, connect, and simplify your HR processes.
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