Strange but true: offboarding can help improve employee retention. And it’s about far more than just making sure the leaver’s laptop is handed in. Read on to learn why.

If you’re using an external vendor for your employee exit interviews you should be gathering honest, meaningful feedback on why employees choose to leave. Some may leave because they are moving or to take a career break, but for many leavers, they’re moving for higher pay, better benefits or more growth opportunities. Even though they may be leaving, don’t ignore this valuable feedback as you can use it to make changes in your company.

Testing Solutions

Once you’ve spotted a trend as to why people are leaving, it can take some creative thinking to design your solutions, and in most organisations it will take a group effort. Having data on your side is more powerful than coming to your planning meeting with a hunch, a theory or even just hearsay.

Having data at your fingertips can also help you prioritise. If higher pay isn’t the leading cause for employees leaving, it stands to reason that higher pay shouldn’t be the first proposed change on your agenda.

Create Expectations

Having a clear testing plan to improve employee retention will help your team and those outside HR understand the solution you’re testing, how long it should take and how to evaluate progress. Be realistic about how you will be implementing changes throughout the organisation – it will require a lot of input from employees and you’ll need buy-in and continuous feedback to make sure that any information that’s shared is actually listened to. Explaining where changes can be made and where they can’t – and why – will go a long way to showing transparency and improving trust across the rest of the organisation.

If you’re not fully informed on how to improve employee retention, then download our Offboarding Strategy infographic.