What are the best ways to share exit interview results with senior management?

Don't forget to collect demographic variables in order to slice the data by various groups. That way, you can identify group differences regarding why people are leaving the organization. These insights can help drive a more data-driven diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy, focusing efforts on retaining certain identity groups based on why people within those groups are leaving the organization.

Providing short summaries that emphasize important trends, issues, and suggestions is one of the best methods to communicate exit interview findings to senior management. For better understanding, we can use simple visuals such as charts or graphs.

Data that is department wise or manager wise gives a deeper perspective about how people are being treated and why someone may be leaving. Overall data should also tell upper management about the company as a whole. For example., if the salaries are in your company compared to market trends or certain benefits are missing.

The main patterns, I see with exit interviews, are biased towards the former employees. The employees that do a good job, the senior manager will take their ideas for themselves. My observation is, management will say, you didn't fit the corporate culture, because they are saving their own job. Exit interviews should be positive, how the employee will not go to old patterns. Furthermore, don't be too transparent with your manager and leaders of that culture. Live and learn, and not go backwards.

Analyze regrettable vs. non-regrettable turnover. The employees you want to retain may be leaving the organization for different reasons than the employees you're happy to see go.

We do an exit survey for our high volume positions; we report that data in summary, so individuals know their individual results won't be called out. It only goes to voluntary terms. For our doctors, we offer an interview. People are actually quite candid these days. We analyze these data along with term codes. Data from multiple sources, put in context with appropriate caveats and info about what we're doing and NOT doing is often a good approach.

Providing recommendations and actions steps can only be useful when based on accurate responses, and data. There are many variables to consider, but the most important comes from honest employees exiting the company. For this to occur, the exiting employee needs to feel that they can trust the person asking the questions, and that their input is indeed welcomed and will not come back to haunt them as they pursue other job opportunities. When providing recommendations, consider recommendations that center on improving reception of honest responses from those exiting.

Exit interview data are often misleading because the person exiting the company is thinking about not burning bridges and my give bogus reasons for leaving, such as “seeking greater career opportunities.” The real reason may be more basic, such as their boss was a jerk or the culture was toxic. To get at the real reasons, hire a third party and conduct interviews with former employees six months after they have left the company. They may be more inclined to provide the real reasons they left.

This is not my direct area of expertise, but... Here's a thought: Shouldn't the exit survey findings relate back to what the organisation is trying to achieve culturally (i.e., desired employee behaviours) and the org's goals around EX (employee experience)? The culture and EX vision and goals then become the benchmark to measure against. Every employee will have a different EX, so aggregated exit survey data tracked against the org's people goals would (you'd hope) give you a decent measure of how the company is tracking against its people objectives.