I’ve written previously about the positive implications and strategy for 1:1s.
One of the more important – and often overlooked – one on one sessions is the exit interview.
My first job out of college, an exit interview is a nice way of saying that someone from HR runs through a checklist of to-dos with you, then security escorts you out of the building – “just because.”
I’ve found that exit interviews we do nowadays are highly valuable.
- As you can expect, someone on their last day has little motive to withhold anything but the raw truth.
- Their team lead may do their own exit interview, but we’ve found it beneficial to have one of the founders – oftentimes me – do one. At the end of the day, the founders have more of a vested interest than anyone else.
- We’ll sit down, door closed, for about thirty minutes.
- I usually start off with a polite demand that they be as candid as possible. This isn’t a forum to air dirty laundry or throw anyone under the bus – this is a time to really understand what we could have done better.
- Why are you leaving? There are two answers to be discovered here – the benefits of the new opportunity/city/role, and what didn’t keep them with us.
- What could we have done better?
- Then there may be specific questions relate to their given answers. I sometimes find that it may take asking the question a couple times, rephrasing it, or digging in with more “whys” in order to get to the root of the issue.
- Raw notes are the most important thing to send along. You can tl;dr it, come up with action items – but capturing exactly what a departing employee says is important.
- I normally send it off to the rest of the exec team, but sometimes it may be necessary to let that be the decision of the team lead. As transparent as we strive to be, sometimes it’s not appropriate to share the raw information about a team lead.
- Like any other piece of qualitative data, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. They hopefully are providing their honest opinions, but realize they are just opinions. I’ve coached the team not to make knee-jerk reactions and treat everything they say as actionable to-dos. We’ve made that mistake before.
