Why you don’t know why people are leaving

Given that attrition is one of the most important dynamics at play in the health of any organisation, it’s remarkable how few people can answer a simple question: Why do our people leave?

Asking the right questions

Quite apart from its wider implications, it’s a question that surely ought to sit right at the heart of any strategy for achieving gender parity. After all, if you know why women leave then you’ll have some insight into how you might be able to persuade them not to, and all the data we’ve seen suggests that would be a uniquely powerful tool in helping to get more women into senior positions. 

And yet the reason so many people struggle to answer the question is also alarmingly simple: Because they don’t ask it.  Or if they do ask it, they don’t ask it very well.

What do I mean by this last point? Take, for example, an organisation we did some work with recently: When employees leave they’re given an exit interview with their line manager, who then enters a code on an internal system to denote the reason for leaving. Guess how often they select the code for “ineffective line manager”.  Now guess what wider research says about why people leave organisations. Uh-huh. 

Asked by the right person

There are a couple of lessons that need learning here: The first is that it really matters who conducts the interview. Line managers, for all the knowledge they bring, are almost certainly not the right people. But how confident can you be that anyone internal, let alone line managers, will have the requisite level of objectivity and skill to elicit candour from the interviewee, conduct a balanced interview, and record what was said in a way that can be fully trusted?

What do you do with the answers?

The second lesson is that you need to think carefully about how you capture what the interviewee says and what you do with it. Exit interviews are only useful if they result in a record that’s faithful to the opinions expressed by the interviewee and that can be used to learn lessons and make  whatever changes are needed to reduce the chances of other people leaving for the same reasons.. Having a clear, consistent process matters, but it shouldn’t result in the loss of nuance. 

But sometimes the key is just to ask the question in the first place. Exit interviews represent a golden opportunity for learning. They’re a precious moment when you get to hear from someone who has first hand experience of what it’s like to work in your organisation and who feels relatively unencumbered by the need to speak cautiously. Too often that opportunity is going begging. 

Enlist some help

I should declare an interest here: We do a lot of work in this space - interviewing people who are leaving or have already left, as well as people who are not currently known to be on their way out (stay interviews) - but that means we really know from first-hand experience what value a combination of independence and specialist skill can offer. If you would like advice on understanding why your talent decides to leave and what you could do to encourage people to stay, please do get in touch.