Exit Interviews…
…to paraphrase Frankie Goes to Hollywood…’what are they good for?’
So to start, this is comedy, if you wish to think it is based on reality, then knock yourself out kiddo, pick the bones out of this. Next, coins have three sides.
Honestly, what are they good for? The employee leaving…allowing a sense of cathartic anger to get things out of your system? Or the employer…re-confirming what everyone with half an ounce of self awareness knows after 23% of your company left that year?
Instead here is a primer on why people leave companies and a call to action. (Personally I hate these, but they seem to be de rigueur these days as though people are now incapable of reading an article and not getting the meaning out of it. And frankly if you can’t, then the writer has done an awful job or you, the reader, is dumber than bones, and perhaps both.)
Anyways, Reasons why leaving
There are three and only three reasons why people leave. Two are interlinked and one is purely because you are a greedy grub. (Thought bubble here…will there be a fourth option in the future? Will people leave AIs and vice versa? And would that be termed something else? Algorithm Anger perhaps?)
People
An employee leaves an employer because of the people they work with. While Google Scholar will cite trillions of examples of work that shows the candid truth of people leave managers, that is only part of the people side of the coin.
You can have the BFF of a manager, but if you are working with a troupe of ‘ist or ‘ism clowns then you can turn the egg timer on how long you will last. It might be a long time but last forever it won’t. Their crass humour and awful behaviour will eventually penetrate your psyche and skin. Those little nicks on your self esteem will build up; you’ll start to go home to kick the dog, scream at the kids and argue with your significant other.
This is not to say you won’t ever leave an asshole of a manager. You will. Everyone does at some point (unless you are the empathy free zone of the asshole manager yourself…then this article will pass you by like a cloud over a pirate ship on a moonless night.) It is by the very nature of probability you will get one eventually. And I suggest reading such wonderful literature as the Asshole Survival Guide by Robert Sutton; this and plenty of other books like it, will give you some great tips and tricks on how to survive the Asshole.
Finally there is the leadership, the management, basically anyone further up the greasy pole than your immediate management. They can have the most awful impact on your working life purely because they too have Asshole tendencies. This could be their approach to their staff, their monstrous desire to make so much money that Getty would blush, or just frankly a work ethic that is Sisyphean in its outlook. And as David Hurley, Chief of the Australian Defence Force once said “The Standard You Walk Past Is The Standard You Accept” comes from the top and like shit rolling down hill, eventually smothers you as much as everyone else.
Culture
Which moves me nice and smartly to culture. Everything has a culture, these are the social norms of behaviour that is embodied in how people walk, talk, behave and generally just act up. Mostly they aren’t written down, just picked up by osmosis. As you get longer tenure you go from learning such culture to imbuing the culture to the newbies. And frankly most work culture sucks and blows. Back to David Hurley, you know that when people scream and shout in meetings a lot and that is not nipped in the bud, then it is accepted and people will start to do it themselves.
You can take culture as the other side of the people coin. People live by a culture and a culture lives by people. They really can’t be separated and you could argue that when people leave they are still leaving their work colleagues, their managers and their leadership. Even so a culture can live past people, managers come and go, they leave, they get promoted (well hello there Peter Principle…interesting point here is that it seems there is a modern day Addendum to the Peter Principle and that is people get promoted way, way past their competency level and end up in the C-Suite, but that is another story), and yet the culture in a team, in a workplace can stay. Bit like the wonderful monkey experiments that show how learned behaviour can continue even if the original event no longer occurs.
Also, Culture is not work per se. Work is what is done by a company, how the company behaves when that work is going badly is culture. An example; a team is doing 60+ hour weeks, week in week out. Even though this is tracked, HR doesn’t get hold of the team lead and ask what is going on, can anything be done, well basically anything. When the excessive hours are raised, the response is lukewarm at best and in actual fact rather useless…something along the lines of you should stop doing that. That is culture responding to an issue. That is the business more interested in making money from unpaid overtime than actually caring about the health and mental well being of their staff.
Same with training. Many companies offer giant dangly carrots of training to make sure that you, as a great employee, stay a great employee that is employable and capable of doing their job. And from an employee perspective that is rather wonderful, as it is nice to know you have some form of career that will actually extend out past the end of the decade and may even approach your desired retirement. Of course when that training budget gets cut due to profitability issues (this will be wrapped up in some nice weasel words…but all comes down to the same thing, someone fucked up further up the food chain and you are getting screwed) or the CEO’s pet project needs a few million to get off the ground then once again you are in firmly in the culture muck. A good culture would see the training of staff as sacrosanct and not a bucket to siphon cash from. A bad culture doesn’t see it as robbing the future of the company to pay for today.
Every aspect of the business is impacted by culture; whether it be the never ending processes that spring up like weeds in a garden or an aversion to risk that borders on the pathological. They all stem from how people behave and react to things. Processes, as an example, have been likened to scar tissue for a business; have you ever noticed how frequent that a new process comes into play after a failure, a fuck up. It is all a post incident attempt to make sure that breakdown doesn’t happen again. Ironically no one ever does the opposite; look at processes to see if they hindered a successful outcome. They are just additive to the business so that eventually it becomes so sclerotic that it can’t function.
Fundamentally most people won’t leave solely because of culture, there are people involved in the decisions, but it will be there. When meetings are such that people need to go around in packs for their own, or their colleagues survival, or people wonder aloud who is getting the pineapple that day; and this happens pretty much all the time, that is not a kumbaya workplace and the culture stinks. Wrap that up with all the other little pieces of cultural vandalism and hey ho off to some other place of work you go.
Money
And then there is the final side of the coin; Money(see three sides, heads, tails and edge.) Most, if not almost all, people will say that money is not the be all and end all of a leaving decision. People are also liars. Yes people like good, solid work, that has intrinsic value and money is an extrinsic concept and wears off quickly, but trying telling that to some who has a credit card smashing the monthly limits every month, a Uni debt that never seems to diminish and is looking at rising house prices thinking i’m only ever going to live in a shoe box. Money is a factor. Even if it comes down to not getting less than you are already on. And frankly if someone offers you a motza to do the same thing, you’d be mad to not take it.
Recap
People leave for three reasons, their colleagues suck, the culture sucks and their pay is sucky. And frankly if the drones in HR (Human Resources…the most aptly named part of an organisation in history. Resources are exploited, think oil or coal. Used up and then discarded) can’t figure this all out for themselves then they are part of the problem. It shouldn’t take a data scientist to know that if your company has an attrition rate north of 20% something is wrong. Yet, for many organisations the hiring cycle from HR seems to be along the lines of find and hire someone, pay them (oh wait that’s payroll; let’s give them the benefit of the doubt), remove all forms of happiness and joy, conduct exit interview.
So here is an off the cuff tip for everyone…go talk to people. You know, ask them for a coffee. Do a temperature check. Get all managers to ask their staff how they are going. Weird what happens when you talk to people…you may find out stuff.
Call to action
There are three calls to action. First stop conducting those month long surveys that has every man, woman and robot in the company exhorting people to complete them before the deadline. People are busy and saying it only takes ten minutes to complete, results in a wonderful set of graphs and then nothing changes doesn’t really get people all happy and rocking. Instead just ask two questions, the first is why are you staying and the second is are you happy, not unhappy, unhappy. You don’t need more than that. But what you do need to do is ask the hard questions on why people are staying. Things like not found a new job, suits me to not have a career path, my manager is a lazy arse and I get away with murder are all good reasons as to why people are staying. Do ask the positive reasons as well; great place to work and so on. You will at least get some truth and possibly give you a chance to address the second call to action.
And the second call to action is don’t walk past the behaviours, attitudes and abuses that happen on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. Fix them. Have some empathy to how people are going to react and take things. For example, If you as a manager or leader, think that your staff having worked like galley slaves all year are going to react badly to not getting a bonus, then you fucked up when you set the targets and then continued fucking up by making them work like galley slaves knowing that they wouldn’t get rewarded. That is all on the management.
The final call to action is to you dear reader. Don’t ever just think this is all on someone else to fix. Fixing things starts with you. Either by reacting differently to such behaviour and not letting it get to you or by addressing the things that suck; tilt at those windmills.
The list of things that can be fixed never ends, but you can make the workplace a better place so that the grass doesn’t look so green on the other side. Oh and don’t call HR HR, call it something a little more fluffy like People and Culture. It is, after all, about the People and the Culture.