Exit Interview

With the current skills shortage continuing to bite, attracting and retaining employees is becoming more difficult for organisations Australia-wide and they are incurring significant costs as a result.  The cost of an employee leaving an organisation comprises direct costs, such as recruitment agency fees, but also indirect costs, such as loss in productivity, IP, client relationships and the morale of the staff that remain.

Understanding the actual motivations behind resignations from your organisation is a vital first step in addressing staff turnover issues within your organisation.  But this is regularly overlooked.  In fact, in a recent survey conducted by AIM, one-in-three organisations currently experiencing high staff turnover did not know why some or all of their staff left.

Failure to identify the reasons behind staff resignations means that remedial action cannot be undertaken to increase staff retention, so the loss of staff from your organisation will continue.

The Australian Institute of Management understands the importance of collecting comprehensive information about the motivations employees have for resigning and has developed an Exit Interview template to formalise the Exit Interview process and ensure that information is collected in a consistent way, such that the results of Exit Interviews can be amalgamated and compared over time.

The Process In Brief

The Australian Institute of Management has designed an Exit Interview template to assist your organisation in conducting Exit interviews with staff.

The template is designed as a self-completion questionnaire for the employee to complete themselves, should they be reluctant to speak out about their motivations for leaving. However, the template could equally be utilised as an interview guide and completed by the interviewer during a face-to-face  Exit Interview.

Staff may be reluctant to feed information about their motivations for resigning directly back to the organisation they are leaving. In this case, should a number of Exit Interviews be required to be undertaken, the Australian Institute of Management can act as an independent third party to collect the completed questionnaires, enter them and produce a report that amalgamates feedback from all respondents into an anonymous report.

AIM Exit Interview Survey Tool

The Australian Institute of Management recognises that there are two key factors influencing an employee’s decision to resign:

• The role
• The organisation

These are explored individually in the questionnaire template that we have developed.  To ensure speed of completion and consistency of information collected, the template comprises ‘closed’ questioning, where the respondent selects from lists and rates their level of agreement/satisfaction with statements. In addition, the survey offers the option for verbatim feedback to be supplied by the respondent to ‘flesh-out’ the reasons for the answers given.

The Role

The respondent is asked to rate their satisfaction with their role and how this has changed since they joined the organisation. They are asked to identify from a list the main reasons for their departure.

The Organisation

The respondent is asked to rate their agreement with statements about the working environment, culture and values of the organisation as well as provide an indication of their future intentions (where they are going to, whether they would work at the organisation in the future).

The template also collects broad demographic information on the respondent, such that the function and level of the employee in the organisation can be ascertained to focus remedial activity.

Why use AIM?

The Australian Institute of Management is a peak professional body that has existed to provide excellence in management training and development for over 60 years.  It has an enviable reputation for the quality and practical focus of the learning experiences and organisational development solutions that it offers. As Australia's largest professional body for managers, AIM facilitates management and leadership excellence by promoting, supporting and developing the profession of management in all its forms.  We are best known as Australia's largest private provider of management training and consultancy services.

The AIM Research and HR Consulting team provides tools, independent information and consultancy on all aspects of people and relationship management that impact managerial effectiveness and organisational performance. We specialise in performance measurement, employee satisfaction, as well as remuneration benchmarking and role evaluation.  We provide:

• Objectivity: Data is handled in the strictest confidence and reported back impartially;
• Flexibility : We can offer organisations standard ‘off-the-shelf’ templates to cut costs, but also have the ability to alter the templates to incorporate specific client requirements;
• Full-service: The Australian Institute of Management has the resource to provide training intervention to support remedial activity where necessary.