The FutureWork Institute’s Joseph Gibbons believes, however, that the information gleaned from exit interviews is not reliable. "People will say whatever it takes to get them out the door without being tripped up," he says. "We are doing post-exit interviews, conducted one year later, and they produce much more honest results. The results are often so volatile that they almost have to be printed on asbestos." When FutureWork reports the findings to senior management, "the responses range from the firm that put the results on a shelf to another where the CEO called in his people and said, ‘I want this problem fixed within a week and that one fixed within a month.’"

     Catalyst also conducts post-exit interviews for companies. "They are extremely important for educating senior management," says Marcia Brumit Kropf, vice president for research and information services. "Often, what we find is myth-breaking. For example, many women say they are leaving the company to spend more time with their families, but one year later, they are working someplace else. At one firm, women often left after seven or eight years, and there was much higher turnover among women. The firm was forced to pick partners from a much smaller pool than the leadership wanted, and they had rationalized it as ‘they are all going home to be with their families.’ When they discovered that the women were working somewhere else, it was a shock."

Workforce, December 2002, p. 37 -- Subscribe Now!