How to encourage employee feedback in exit interviews

The last conversation HR has with an employee shouldn’t also be the first.

“By the time someone is sitting with me in an exit interview…we hopefully have a relationship in place, we have built trust, and ideally I’m not hearing about any big theme for the first time,” Jaime Petkanics, chief people officer at vitamin-maker Gruns, said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast. “An exit interview is great, all feedback is a gift, but ultimately the most useful feedback is the feedback you get when there’s still something you can do about it.”

She sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, to discuss her exit interview strategy, and the one question she wishes she could ask outgoing employees.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you start exit interviews?

Once they get into that conversation, you really want to set the stage for here’s what we’re here to do and here’s what I would love to get out of this conversation and here’s what I’m going to do with it. Right? No one is going to be honest with you in an exit interview if they know you’re going to take the full script and verbatim go repeat it back to their manager, their teammates, the leadership team. But obviously, like you said, we don’t want this feedback just like sitting in a dusty old Google Doc doing absolutely nothing. So actually explaining to people a little bit on the backend of what you do with that feedback and how you relay it will hopefully put someone at ease.

How do you think HR professionals should share feedback from exit interviews?

The key is looking for themes across different vehicles of feedback, exit interviews being one of them. One-on-ones that I have with members of the team or that the generalists on my team have with the team is another, our engagement surveys that we do twice a year is another. When I meet with our leadership team and they pass on themes they’re hearing from their team, that’s another. And then the best thing you can do is triangulate that feedback and put it into a format that is usable for change, and that motivates change, right? It’s not successful and it also doesn’t build trust to have one exit interview and then take that back to a leader or to your CEO and say, “Here’s what I learned in this exit interview, because it’s so easy to say, “Well, that’s just one person’s individual experience, so everyone else seems to be fine on that topic.” But if you take a whole quarter to gather the themes and triangulate the feedback…oftentimes what I have learned in exit interviews is thematic and it does align with other things that I’ve heard.

How do you create a culture of respectful candor and feedback?

I think it’s so important how people respond to feedback. Someone will walk into a meeting so energized with an idea or something to share, and if they get shot down, whether it’s an idea or feedback or if someone responds either like shutting them down or defensively, maybe you get one or two more times where someone bothers to show up with that energy, but not too many more times than that. And then in hiring and onboarding both, one question I ask in almost all of my interviews is, “When’s the last time you had to give somebody really difficult feedback?” And I try to get a sense of the level of comfort that that person has with being direct, especially when it’s hard. Someone who has developed that muscle can speak about it really freely, they can give me tons of examples. They’re not uncomfortable with the question, and that person will be successful in our culture that values directness as long as it comes from a solution-oriented place.

Are there any questions that you wish you could ask in exit interviews but you know that you shouldn’t?

Everyone has that work best friend that they go to and they vent to after a tough day. Or maybe you bring it home to your spouse or your partner or your friend or your mom. I want to know when you’re venting to that person, what is the raw feed of that, because maybe it’s not productive, but it would get at the core of what is bothering you…I’d love the raw feed of that as a supplement to a more productive forward-facing conversation that we might be having in the room. But I’ll never get access to that tape.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.