Exit Interview Data Analysis: A 7-Step Process

Exit interview data analysis is the key to making the most of your exit interview process. The data behind why employees leave can help you better grasp what’s affecting your organization’s turnover and what you can do about it. 

Contents
What is an exit interview?
Why conduct an exit interview?
What do you measure in an exit interview?
How do you analyze an exit interview?
Best practices for exit interview data analysis
FAQ

What is an exit interview?

An exit interview is a one-on-one conversation with a departing employee to seek feedback about their experience with the organization. A neutral third party should conduct the interview, so it’s typically an HR representative. They present a set of specific, uniform questions to every employee who is separating from employment. 

This final stage of an employee’s journey provides closure and allows them to be heard in a setting where they can express themselves candidly. Their opinions and suggestions provide insight into the circumstances surrounding their departure and how the organization is viewed through the employee’s eyes. It’s a way to learn what may have gone wrong and whether something can be done to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Another way of collecting data from your departing employees is conducting an exit survey, which is a questionnaire to get feedback on their reasons for leaving and the overall employee experience.

This information can help you identify the root causes of employee turnover and other problem areas. Then, you can address them to improve the work environment and employee satisfaction.

Why conduct an exit interview?

The benefits of exit interviews make them a standard procedure for employers of all sizes. An exit interview is a valuable tool for many reasons, including:

• Gaining a better understanding of why people leave
• Offering employees the opportunity to have a voice
• Collecting data that can improve organizational effectiveness and boost employee retention
• Being able to hold managers accountable when needed
• Discovering whether any illegal or unethical practices are taking place
• Providing former employees with a positive final impression of the organization to champion your employer brand.

The importance of offboarding

Just as onboarding starts new hires with pertinent information and walks them through essential procedures, offboarding is necessary to appropriately wrap up the employee life cycle appropriately. Offboarding covers all the required tasks, paperwork, and legal requirements while also ending the employment relationship on good terms.

Departing employees get their last impression of the company during offboarding. They can leave as either a resentful adversary or an advocate who speaks highly of the organization. No matter what led to their exit, offboarding can send them on their way with respect and professionalism. 

Exit interviews are a crucial part of offboarding and should be conducted when employees leave under all circumstances, i.e., resignation, employment or contract termination, lay-off, or retirement. They allow employees to be heard and clear up misunderstandings. Exit interviews also provide HR with information that it wouldn’t otherwise obtain about why employees leave.

What do you measure in an exit interview?

Exit interviews provide you with a wealth of data on various aspects of the employee experience at your organization:

• Reasons for leaving: Exit interviews help you understand the factors that influenced the employee’s decision to leave the organization, such as job satisfaction, management issues, career advancement opportunities, salary and benefits, work-life balance, or organizational culture.
• Employee (dis)satisfaction: Gauge the departing employee’s satisfaction with various elements of their job and the organization, for example, their relationship with managers and colleagues, the nature of their work, recognition and reward systems, and the support provided for personal and professional development.
• Work environment and culture: Assess the employee’s perspective on the work environment and organizational culture, including any suggestions for improvement. This can highlight issues related to DEIB, teamwork, communication practices, and overall workplace dynamics.
• Management and leadership: Collect feedback on the effectiveness of management and leadership practices and understand how employees see the level of support received from supervisors, clarity of expectations, feedback and performance evaluation processes, and decision-making within the organization.
• Training and development opportunities: Evaluate the adequacy and effectiveness of training and professional development opportunities provided to the employee and how these influenced their job performance and career progression.
• Overall experience: Capture the departing employee’s overall experience working for the organization, including what they valued most and least about their tenure and any final suggestions they have for improvement.

How do you analyze an exit interview?

To make the most of exit interviews, you need to analyze the data that’s gathered from them. This is how you translate feedback from employees into useful information. Then, you can draw from it to make changes and improvements. 

Here is an overview of the 7 steps involved in conducting a data analysis with your exit interview data:

1. Define the problem

The first step in the process of analyzing exit interview data is to know what you’re trying to accomplish. You’ll need to collaborate with management and other stakeholders to understand what the business need is. What problem do you want the data to help you solve? 

Outline the objective by formulating a problem statement, for instance:

• Top employees aren’t being retained
• People are consistently quitting a specific position or department
• Younger workers leave once they reach a certain point of employment.

Then you turn the problem statement into a question that you want the data to answer. An example could be, “How do we retain top talent?” Then take it a step further to make it as specific as possible, “How do we retain top talent in team leader positions?” 

Next, you can determine the desired outcome that will benefit the company. It might be, “Retaining top talent in team leader positions will maintain productivity and provide a pool of potential candidates for higher level management.”

2. Determine what exit interview data will be collected

Once you know what you’re looking for, you need to decide which data you’ll need and how to collect it. The two types of data to consider are qualitative and quantitative. Let’s take a look at these.

Qualitative data:

Qualitative data express subjective and interpretive qualities that can’t be measured numerically but can be observed, recorded, and categorized. This type of data approximates and characterizes something.

This data type is collected from formats such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews with open-ended questions. It defines a trait and expresses it without numbers.

Examples of qualitative data from exit interviews could be: 

• The work environment is inclusive but demanding
• The organizational culture promotes collaboration and innovation.

Quantitative data:

Quantitative data are expressed in numbers and can be verified and validated, allowing you to determine how much, how many, and how often. This type of data can be gathered during exit interviews by offering a numerical ranking for responses.

As an example, the exit interview quantitative data could be:

• 65% of departing employees rate the company 3 out of 5 overall as an employer
• 25% of departing employees rank their managers below 4 out of 5 for impartiality.

3. Collect the exit interview data 

Now that you have a data strategy, you’ll need to design the exit interview process to collect the necessary information. Here is an overview of what this entails:

Establish functions of the exit interview:

In addition to solving a specific business problem, exit interviews serve other purposes, which include the following: 

• Formally finalizing the employment relationship
• Seeing a snapshot of the employee experience and overall perception of company culture
• Identifying both what’s working and where the problem areas are
• Learning whether the former employee will promote the organization in the future.

Develop effective exit interview questions/survey:

Asking the right type of questions will provide better results. Using an exit interview template can help you maintain consistency. Be sure that the questions are:

• Worded in a non-judgmental way to encourage honest answers
• Standardized to obtain consistent data
• Posed with adequate time to respond
• Able to prompt some open-ended replies to acquire more detail.

It’s helpful to focus the questions on evaluating certain job components. We have created a comprehensive list of the types of questions to ask. 

Here is a summary of the five categories and a sample question for each one:

1. The employee: “Explain the circumstances that prompted you to look for another job.”
2. The job: “Did the job match your expectations from when you were first hired?
3. The company culture: “How would you define our company culture?”
4. The work environment: “What did you like best about coming to work?”
5. The resources/technology: “Did you have the tools you needed to do your best in the role?”

Conduct the exit interview:

Along with the right questions, there are some administrative logistics for conducting a successful exit interview. Here are a few tips:

• Schedule the interview as close to the person’s departure as possible. If they have one foot out the door, they’ll feel more comfortable being open and sincere.
• For exit surveys, use automated systems to streamline data collection and analysis, for example, an employee feedback tool.
• Be mindful that certain questions may evoke an emotional response, especially when an employee is let go. 
• Assure confidentiality about what they share and show appreciation for their input.

4. Clean the exit interview data 

Before you start analyzing the exit interview data, you must ensure it’s reliable, especially when analyzing quantitative data. When you compile data from multiple sources, duplication and mislabeling can occur. “Clean” data will be complete, consistent, and accurate. “Dirty” data reflect errors and inconsistencies. Putting effort into erroneous data will waste your time and impede the results. 

Data cleaning or scrubbing is recognizing and correcting faults in the raw data. You can perform the following data cleaning tasks to preserve the data quality: 

• Extract irrelevant data points that don’t contribute to the analysis.
• Identify duplicate responses and remove outliers and significant errors.
• Unify the data by organizing the layout and fixing typos. 
• Look for any missing values and fill in the blanks.
• Anonymize responses to protect employee privacy and confidentiality.

We have developed an in-depth guide on what Excel tools and functions can assist you in cleaning your data in Excel. Some of these include: 

• How to remove duplicates
• Sorting data
• Converting data (Using the VALUE and TEXT functions).

5. Analyze the data

Now, it’s time to analyze the exit interview data and glean some insight. Individually, exit interviews and surveys may not be a rich source of data, but collectively, they will reveal certain trends and patterns. 

You’ll need to determine what tools to use in analyzing the data. Your talent management or HR software probably has some type of offboarding component, but it may not be detailed enough. Various technology solutions specifically exist for exit interview data, but Excel is also a powerful and readily available tool.

Our in-depth guide on Excel tools and functions also presents several tools you can use to help you analyze your data. These include: 

• Using Slicers and Filters
• PivotTables

Your approach to data analysis will depend on what you need the data to tell you. Our article on types of HR analytics can give you more comprehensive information, but data analytics generally fall under one of the following four categories:

1. Descriptive analysis: Summarizes data and describes what has taken place. (Example: The number of employees that have left the organization in one year.)
2. Diagnostic analytics: Identifies why something has happened.  (Example: Finding the most commonly disclosed reason that people resign.)
3. Predictive analysis: Formulates future trends by making models from historical data. (Example: Forecasting employee turnover for the following year.)
4. Prescriptive analysis: Applies past and present data to make recommendations for future decisions. (Example: Identifying areas of employee engagement that need action to prevent turnover.)

There are multiple metrics you can track next to your exit interview data, including the following:

• Employee turnover rate: The number of employees who have left compared to the average number of employees. You may want to break this down into voluntary and involuntary turnover.
• Retention rate: The number of employees who are employed after subtracting those who have departed over a set period.
• Retention rate per manager: The number of resignations per department/manager as a percentage of all resignations.
• Retention rate of top/low performers: The number of top or low performers who stay with the company for a defined period compared to the total number of employees at the start of that time.
• Exit interview completion rate – The number of completed exit interviews compared to the number offered.

6. Share insights with stakeholders

Interpreting your findings and making conclusions is the culmination of data analysis. You’ll need to produce an exit interview analysis report and present it to stakeholders.

How to summarize exit interview results

Your exit interview report should explain the exit interview process, which data you collected, and some ideas for what needs to be addressed. You should also be prepared to make suggestions for how to take action.

• Group responses into relevant categories such as work environment, management, compensation, and career development.
• Focus on addressing the most pressing issues that have the potential to impact employee retention or organizational effectiveness.
• For optimal impact, the exit interview report should contain data visualization techniques. Presenting the data in an illustrative form provides stakeholders with a more tangible way to grasp the information. Diagrams, graphs, pie charts, colors, shapes, etc., all put the numbers into a picture that non-technical people can see and comprehend better. 
• It’s also important to tailor the information you present according to your audience’s needs. Focusing on what certain stakeholders are most interested in will give your findings and insights more credibility.
• Prepare an exit interview analysis presentation where you talk your stakeholders, for example, managers and senior leaders, through your findings.

7. Determine actions to be taken

Once you’ve gathered and analyzed the useful exit interview data, it’s time to transfer the insights into solutions. You should be able to identify the matters that require attention and make data-driven decisions to set your next steps.

You can leverage exit study data to change policies and practices that will improve your employee turnover and retention rates. When you know the main reasons employees are leaving, you can examine how different aspects of the employee experience contribute to this.

Here are several business practices you may want to examine for potential weaknesses:

• Recruiting/hiring strategies
• Job training/staff development
• Onboarding
• Targeted manager coaching/training
• Mentor program implementation
• Work-life balance issues
• Compensation and benefits package

Best practices for exit interview data analysis

You can make your exit interview data analysis even more impactful by following these best practices:

• Engage with current employees: Share relevant, anonymized findings from the exit interviews with current employees. That way, you’re demonstrating that feedback is valued and acted upon. It can also be an opportunity to engage employees in the solution development process and adopt an employee-centric lens on improving your work environment.
• Monitor impact and iterate: After implementing changes, closely monitor key metrics such as employee satisfaction, engagement, and turnover rates to gauge the impact. Use surveys, focus groups, or follow-up interviews to obtain current employee feedback on the changes. Be prepared to make adjustments based on this feedback, as the goal is continuous improvement.
• Report back to leadership: Regularly report the outcomes and learnings from exit interview data analysis and subsequent actions to the organization’s leadership. This should include both successes and areas of ongoing challenget. This will help you secure leadership buy-in and support for long-term initiatives.

To conclude

Exit interviews give employees the proper send-off and provide beneficial information. The data from these straightforward evaluations of the company’s culture and work environment can expose underlying issues that may be contributing to low employee satisfaction. Armed with this evidence, HR can offer strategic solutions that make a difference in curbing unwanted attrition and retaining top talent. 

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