The Exit Interview No One's Reading

Sabrina compares two clients with identical size (25-40 employees) and identical turnover (1-3 departures per quarter). One has a climbing engagement score. The other has been flat or dropping for two years. Same exit interview process, same data collected. The difference is what happens to the data after it's gathered. Three questions determine whether an exit interview process functions or is just a habit: Are people telling you the truth? Format drives honesty — face-to-face over forms, matched to the right interviewer, in an environment where past honesty was treated as safe rather than punished. Is the data reaching decision makers in a way that lands? Written reports get skimmed. Face-to-face delivery forces a reaction in the room and surfaces the defensiveness that kills follow-through before it starts. Has anything ever changed? The single diagnostic question: when's the last time something was changed because of exit interview data? Cumulative patterns drive real change — one person's feedback is an anecdote, three people saying the same thing is a finding. Sabrina closes with a real example: six of seven exit interviews at one client cited the same PTO approval friction. The company fixed the process. The complaint stopped showing up in exit interviews. Run the three-question audit on your last five exit interviews in under ten minutes.