One of the biggest staffing challenges for many retailers is turnover of shopfloor workers. When an employee leaves, it can be tempting to just wave goodbye and get on with finding a new recruit, but that’s an approach which means you could miss an opportunity to find out what is wrong with your business, and what could be done to improve your recruitment and retention capabilities.
Retailers can learn from such leakage by taking the time and effort to carry out exit interviews with staff. “You can gain invaluable information from a person that is leaving that may help you to make changes to help your future retention,” says Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development adviser Frances Wilson.
Norman Ewing, managing partner at retail consultancy Retail Insight, says that exit interviews can reveal much about a business, including issues such as poor pay scales, perceived glass ceilings, management bullying, attitudes to customers, relationships with third-party suppliers, poor performing managers and illegal activities such as racism or theft.
But Ewing says that if you’re going to do exit interviews, you must do them for all staff. “If you don’t carry out exit interviews with everyone, but fancy the idea, then you cherry-pick so you hear the answers you want to hear,” he says.
However, whether such interviews actually get done in the first place can be a different story. “I think the big high-street retailers have a policy that they do it regularly and that’s their stated aim, but how many stick to that?” asks Ewing.
Envision Retail managing director Jason Kemp believes not many: “Hardly anyone does them, because staff turnover in retail is so high,” he says. But Ewing says retailers are missing a trick. “Why is turnover so high in retailing? There are lots of reasons, but if you could just get a bit more feedback there would be more that could be done at the recruitment stage,” he says.
A supermarket store manager in the north of England agrees that the rate of staff turnover – about 30 per cent in his store at present – and timing can prove obstacles to the exit interview process. “The majority of them don’t get done. If we do them, it’s whether we act on them; I’m not sure that we do,” he says.
He adds that the culture of the location also plays a part. “In this store people tend to go off sick and then not come back – about 70 per cent of our colleagues don’t tell us they are going,” he says.
At John Lewis, exit interviews are carried out for all staff by their closest line manager. “We have a standard form that line managers would use,” says John Lewis manager of personnel policy Carole Donaldson. The form runs through housekeeping issues, such as the leaving date and what to do with discount cards, but also includes staff comments on why they are leaving. This is then entered into the retailer’s pay and personnel system, which allows it to identify any particular trends and collate them in graphical or statistical form.
Mike Rawling, until recently general manager of Borders in Milton Keynes and now general manager of the Birmingham Bullring branch, says of the Milton store that it carries out exit interviews for all leavers. “Some of the responses may be something simple like the working environment or breakroom facilities that we can sort out there and then. Others may be around pay or working conditions, which I cannot sort out from the store,” he says.
“Exit interviews are definitely useful for things I can change locally,” continues Rawling. Borders uses a standard multiple-choice questionnaire on which staff can rate different areas of the business and add further comments, so the results of the interviews are easy to collate and analyse by head office.
Kemp says that retailers must be clear about what they are hoping to get from an exit interview. He argues that other methods of communication with staff, such as employee surveys, are more appropriate in terms of finding out about potential problems within the business. “It’s a very reactive thing to do. Taking regular pulses of the business, you can circumvent the need for exit interviews because you are catching problems before people decide to leave,” he says.
The skill of the person conducting the interview may also be an issue. “With exit interviews, you need to be quite skilled to do them and I’m not sure if every store manager or department manager knows how to extract the right information,” says Kemp.
He also points out that a staff member who is leaving a business may not paint a true picture, either because they are wary of burning bridges or getting a bad reference if they are too negative, or they are so disillusioned with the company that they go to the other extreme of over-dramatising the problem.
Such downsides mean it can be tempting not to bother with exit interviews, but Rawling believes there are real benefits in letting departing employees have their say. “It means that staff leave on good terms, feeling that they have been listened to,” he says.
“It’s one of the few opportunities they have to put across their point of view,“ says Wilson. “You could actually turn it around and, by conducting an exit interview, prevent that person from leaving. And while an employee is an employee today, they are still potentially a customer for tomorrow, so you want them to leave with a good feeling about the business,” she explains.
Donaldson says departing John Lewis staff will have been presented with the various options the company offers to try to retain its staff – such as career breaks – but that the exit interview is an additional safety guard. “It can act as a net to capture those that haven’t realised the opportunities they have. It’s also an opportunity to thank them in quite a lot of cases,” she says.
Ewing believes such interviews are also a useful learning exercise for the retailer to find out what that staff member did in that role, things that could be changed and preparing the role for the next recruit. “Getting some of that knowledge back is invaluable,” he says.
The fast pace of retail should not be used as an excuse to avoid exit interviews. “If somebody gives you notice, I don’t think there is any excuse not to plan some time in for an exit interview. They are no issue whatsoever and for us they work,” says Rawling.
Wilson agrees: “In the short term they take longer to do but in the longer term it will help.”
No comments yet