EXIT INTERVIEW ON THE EXIT

                    --Need For a Novel Approach

In a political environment which had many kings, any one of them resting with content with his own territory was likely to fall prey to the expansionist ambitions of another.
                                              -Arthasasthra

In today’s business competition every organization is engaged in fighting the war for talent every day. The organizations are tired & tired of the resignations on short notice, new hires quitting with in few days or months, before the organization could reap their Return on Investment from their new hires. The organization spends so much of money for the recruitment and training to speed-up the new hires to acquaint themselves with the work and its culture. This situation is not only for the new hires but its prevalent for all the employees in the organization.

Even the organizations are ready to exceed the salary expectations of their employees, which was not so a decade ago. In spite of this, there’s a tremendous pressure to retain their employees, which make the organizations to be more innovative in their Human Resource practices. The real issue of employee management is to have the people with right skills when the organization needs. Products and projects are often delayed for want of these appropriate personnel

The loss of an employee who has been trained up for months or years is a bigger problem than resignation of some one who is more recently replaced. It is difficulty and more expensive to find suitable replacements quickly when employees leave, leading to inefficiency and loss of business. Greater damage is done to organizations especially when people of higher profile leave as their explicit knowledge also walks of along with them. Many companies, instead of inventing and adapting new ‘retention practices’, have conditioned themselves to the ‘replacement mentality’ and are spending more money than ever on recruitment, even as their turnover rates continue to increase dramatically.

The continuing acceleration of the pace of change and competition creates increasing demand on the Human Resource professionals to do “something” to control the turnover rates. Specially in industries like IT-ITES and Retailing, which are growing in an accelerated pace and where job hopping and job poaching is the present trend, the demands and pressures are astonishingly mounting on the Human Resource professionals, to figure out ‘how to win the war for talents’ and ‘how to retain them’. Hence, it’s clearly self evident to find out why employees are leaving the organization before measures can be taken to improve the employee-retention record.

Employee Turnover Defined:

Macy and Mirvis (1983) defined employee turnover as movement of employee beyond the boundary of the organization.

Bluedorn (1982) defined withdrawal as a reduction of employees’ socio psychological attraction to or interest in the work organization.

Impact of Employee Turnover:

• Turnover reduces productivity of the entire work team; as a result it creates extra work load, and stress and tension, which in turn leads to decline in the employee morale and commitment.

• Recruiting and Training costs of the new hires are substantially enormous.

• Transfer of innovation may contribute in some instances, to the firms to maintain strategic advantage.

• Excessive turnover is often cited as a key barrier to high quality service.

• It leads to form a poor reputation on the organization as an employer for being unable to retain people.

The common approach used to record the reasons for the employee departure is the ‘Exit Interview’. In simple terms it is a mean of determining the reasons why a departing employee has decided to leave an organization. It’s an interview conducted at the time an employee leaves an organization or completes a lateral transfer within the organization. It’s a typical approach which involves Human resource professionals talking briefly and formally to the departing employee to identify the reasons for leaving.

But does this approach really serve the ultimate purpose of recording the actual reasons for the employees’ departure? This article questions about the validity of the exit interview in recording the ‘employee turnover’ reasons. Though this is a field in which there is no defined ‘best practice’ approach available, at least it should strive to serve the minimum purpose for what actually it is intended to serve. In other words it should be valid. If not the process exit interview ought to face the exit. Does the ‘Exit Interview’ posses the status of validity? Is this process a valid one?????

Contd...
Udayanan Pappuswamy