Best Practices: Exit Surveys

Key considerations for your Exit Survey Strategy

Why should I conduct an exit survey?

Exit surveys are a crucial opportunity to capture feedback from employees who have voluntarily terminated. The information employees provide can inform various aspects of improvement, investment, and priority within the workplace.

How should I conduct my exit survey program?

Exit surveys should be an integral part of the exit process. As soon as an employee has provided notice, a survey experience can take place. As a best practice, the survey is administered upon notice or early within the period leading up to an employee’s exit.

How will WorkTango know if an employee is exiting, and therefore eligible to participate?

WorkTango recommends two options:

• Your organization’s HR team holds responsibility for “triggering” the exit survey process. In this scenario, the team member adds the employee into the survey themselves.
• Your organization informs your WorkTango CSM of the exiting employee(s) on a weekly basis by sending a list of names and employee IDs. WorkTango will add the employee(s) into the survey at a defined time.

Should my exit survey be anonymous?

The WorkTango platform supports both confidential and non-anonymous surveys.

With confidential surveys, you have the benefit of capturing confidential and candid feedback. As a result, you will be able to see data aggregated into segments that surpass your anonymity threshold. Your employees may feel more comfortable to participate freely. WorkTango recommends a minimum threshold of 5 for confidential surveys.

With non-anonymous surveys, you will have clearer visibility into identifying issues and proactively taking action. As a result, you will be able to export raw data directly from the platform. However, you may find that employees are more wary of participating.

Ultimately, regardless of which path you choose, be clear and communicative about how you will use employee feedback captured during the exit experience.

What should I ask in my exit survey?

WorkTango has developed a best practice exit survey for voluntarily terminating employees. Contact your Surveys & Insights Consultant for our recommended questions.

When building a survey in WorkTango, we recommend grouping questions into factors, or themes, such as enablement, goals and alignment, or direct manager. Should you be interested to incorporate your own custom questions, contact your Customer Success Manager for guidance on factor alignment.

WorkTango encourages utilizing rating-based questions on a Likert scale (for example, an agreement scale of Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). For your exit survey, you may also want to incorporate in an open text question, as well as multiple choice questions.

How should I be fielding my exit survey in the WorkTango platform?

The exit survey can be conducted automatically through a “push” from the WorkTango platform. As a result, any employees with work-specific emails can receive the survey via email.

The survey can also be administered through kiosk. This link will prompt the terminating employee to enter in a unique identifier to participate in the survey.

Using the kiosk link is a best practice to embed into HR communications, practices, and processes.

• Many organizations want to give employees time to complete the exit survey after they have left. The kiosk link and unique identifier provides an option for employees to do so.
• By addressing the survey as part of HR communication, your employees will experience more consistent and aligned direction, which in turn can encourage participation.
• The exit survey can also be used in exit interviews, whereby HR personnel can ask survey questions to capture real-time feedback. HR personnel would utilize the kiosk and exiting employee’s unique identifier to complete the survey on the employee’s behalf.

The easiest approach to field an exit survey is to build a survey for a long period of time (such as a year). Every time an employee leaves the organization, they are added into the survey. Survey data can be analyzed in real time, and attribute fields can be introduced to isolate quarters in which the termination took place.

How should I interpret my exit survey data in the WorkTango platform?

Exit data can provide a wealth of information to HR functions, executive teams, and people leaders. Every organization may approach their analysis of exit data differently.

WorkTango recommends interpreting data through the lens of retention. What reasons are employees providing in their decisions to leave an organization? What would employees be willing to consider to return? If you are fielding non-anonymous exit surveys, use your understanding of where the employee sits within your organization to refer to engagement survey data, and the sentiment provided here.