Why's their heart no longer in it? Getting the disengagement diagnosis right with online tools.

The most overlooked source of insights for your employee engagement programme is a meaningful exit interview - and now time-strapped HR has no excuse

Looking back on a career in in-house human resource management, it is hard to own an initial reluctance to implement an approach that was to have such a positive impact on the quality of our team's human resources service - the move to online engagement surveys.

The first version of this article was published in a 2017 print edition of Personnel Messenger, distributed to audiences throughout Africa, from a base in Ghana.

An international provider was offering a 30-day free trial of 50 surveys, together with individual and group reports – an offer that meant we had nothing to lose. By the end of the trial period there was no doubt that the surprisingly affordable service would become our preferred new approach.

What I knew was that an online survey would fill a gap in our service. Resource constraints prevented the personal interview of every employee departing from geographically-dispersed locations. What I did not know was that the data gathered using the new approach for exit interviews would have a profoundly positive impact on our service across the entire employment life-cycle.

What better time to learn about your organisation's strengths and weaknesses than at the point of imminent disengagement?

If the truth be told

In retrospect, the traditional practice of conducting personal interviews with exiting employees is particularly vulnerable to inconsistency. This inconsistency can arise in a number of ways:

• Undertaking an exit interview may drop down the HR priority list in the face of conflicting demands in our daily practice of what emergency medical personnel refer to as triage.
• When an employee conveys a clear reason for resigning, or when they resign in the face of known dissatisfaction (e.g. when unsuccessful in applying for a promotion), this ‘knowledge’ of ‘the leaving reason’ can be seen as sufficient to dispense with an exit interview.
• Priority is given to the interview of employees leaving voluntarily, overlooking the value to both parties of a discussion when the exit arises from the ending of a contract, compulsory retirement, retrenchment or, dare we say, dismissal.
• The skill of the interviewer and the structure of the discussion varies from one interview to another, with some better able to elicit comprehensive data than others.
•  The focus tends to be on the employee’s dissatisfaction at the time of the exit decision and the attractiveness of their future prospects, giving an imbalanced perspective of their total tenure.
• The interviewer may be reluctant to convey the departing employee’s perceptions unambiguously for fear of the line manager’s response to implied criticism, leading to self-censorship of feedback.
• The subjectivity and qualitative nature of the interview makes the individual report-writing process onerous and subject to its own quality limitations, while making the generation of group trend reports very difficult.  

Each of these home truths are contributors to the general problem of inconsistency by HR in the performance of exit interviews, and the overriding consequence is the lost opportunity to gather, analyse and present information in a manner that enables strategic organisational decision-making. What is more, the opportunities lost are the very ones that would otherwise help us achieve and maintain that organisational holy grail: strong employee engagement.  

What better time to learn about your workplace’s strengths and weaknesses in respect of employee engagement than at the point of imminent disengagement?

The dangers of the wrong diagnosis

We have spoken about inconsistency and lost opportunities, but there is another grave danger in our traditional ‘diagnosis’ of the cause of employee turnover. Simply put, we get it wrong. And when the diagnosis is wrong, the treatment regime can be costly while failing to deliver a cure.  

In reality, there is seldom a clear cause-effect relationship when it comes to the reasons for a voluntary exit. The stated reason may be the one uppermost in the employee’s mind at the time of resignation, one that differs from the original precipitant of their alternative job search. What’s more, many employees like to communicate a reason that will be inoffensive to their line manager. Finally, let’s not forget that as employees we are not always able to diagnose our internal dissatisfaction ourselves. Rather, the skilled HR interviewer or comprehensive online survey can elicit an array of observations that together reveal a pattern of contributing circumstances.

Let us consider the most typical example, the employee who advises that they have accepted a position offering improved pay and prospects. It’s a great explanation on many counts: no-one can begrudge their aspirations and no-one needs be offended, and it is often true. Which is not to say that pay dissatisfaction was the precipitant of the job search. That may have been a lack of sufficiently challenging work regardless of pay and seniority. Small wonder that improving remuneration packages amongst employees who are actually craving greater challenge or appreciation fails to stem the tide of resignations.

The new normal

Based on observations over a five-year period, here is what you can expect when you move to a credible online exit interview system:

• Levels of participation in the exit survey process are high, with many who may otherwise decline an interview being comfortable with the questionnaire approach.
• Information of employee perceptions and experiences across the full range of engagement drivers is obtained from each exiting employee. From the survey tool in question we got data covering the job itself (personal growth, job satisfaction and independence), the people (levels of co-operation and quality of the vertical relationship), the transaction (salary and rewards, career progression, loyalty and trust), the organisation (organisational confidence and ethical standards) and the environment (well-being and working conditions).
• An indication of a need for a follow-up, personal interview becomes evident from the individual report, and such interview is enriched by the wealth of information already obtained from the questionnaire.
• High-quality dashboard-style group reports for your business as a whole, or for any number of slices of your exiting employee population (e.g. by department, job category, location, type of contract, leaving reason) are available at the push of a button.
• Professional, comprehensive and easy to interpret group reports can be presented to senior management with no collation or document preparation time, while offering a third-party, independent credibility that takes the pressure off HR to justify the content.
• The time taken by HR in arranging the survey and reviewing the report can amount to minutes rather than hours, while the exiting employee would be dedicating as little as 10 – 20 minutes to their comprehensive feedback.

And so it is that insights from our on-line exit surveys enable the targeted, continuous improvement of the total HR service. They help us recruit better when we are prompted to revisit the requirements of the ideal candidate, they flag the need for changes to the job design and reporting structure, they indicate leadership development needs on the part of line managers, they prompt interventions to bolster healthy team dynamics, they highlight strengths and weaknesses in the implementation of performance management, they expose mismatches between our desired and experienced organisational values and most of all, they help us understand what we are doing right as an organisation.   

Tips for choosing your online exit survey provider

We know it’s possible, so here is what to look for in a credible exit survey provider:

• The survey must be underpinned by a sound model of employee engagement supported by proven practice. With online survey technology freely available there are few barriers to creating a survey - beware providers who know about IT but not about employee engagement.
• Find a provider that offers congruent engagement surveys for pre-emptive use at earlier points in the employment life-cycle so that your broader guidance on employee engagement will have maximum coherence.
• Ensure that you can tailor the employee details fields in a way that suits both your organisation and the country in which it will be administered. The way that we report employee statistics in South Africa must comply with official national labels for race, gender and job category. This will be true for your country too.  
• Your provider should offer a combination of platforms on which the questionnaires can be completed, both web-based and mobi versions with SMS-enabling.
• There should be the option for an administered pen and paper or telephonic interview version for those who lack online access or ability to navigate a text, web-based survey.
• The survey should be available in the major business languages applicable to your organisation.

It has been argued that the traditional exit interview process is prone to inconsistencies and lost opportunities. It is also true that there are times when we are relieved that an employee has decided to leave, and there is often little we can do to dissuade a valued employee from proceeding with a resignation.

Whatever the circumstances, we must ensure that every instance is used to gather credible information that is used to improve engagement among those remaining in our employ.

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Penny Milner-Smyth is a registered Master HR Practitioner with the South African professional board, the SABPP. She holds an MA (Research Psychology) from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and spent 25 years of her career in a senior in-house HR leadership role. She is now director of Ethicalways, a consulting firm assisting organisations in the Sub-Saharan Africa region foster ethical workplace cultures. Email: [email protected].

A regular speaker and writer on the topics of ethics and engagement, Penny is the author of Employee Engagement - Integrating Theory, New Insights and Today's Challenges, a chapter in ‘Strategic HR Management: An African Perspective’, to be published by Knowledge Resources during 2018. Her keynote The Heartbeat of Engagement: Ethics at Work features on Knowledge Resources' 2018 HR Business Partner conference series - catch it this year in Cape Town, Johannesburg or Durban, South Africa.