People tell a form things they will not say across a desk to the person they are leaving.
The face to face exit interview has a known problem: almost nobody uses it to be candid, because they want a reference and they want the last two weeks to be pleasant. A written survey, sent after the notice period rather than during it, gets closer to the truth.
An exit interview survey asks somebody who is leaving why they are going and what would have kept them. The value is entirely in the written answers, and the value of those depends on when you send it and whether the answers can be traced back.
In the last week, or better, two weeks after the last day. Sent during the notice period it collects diplomacy. Sent afterwards it collects the reason.
The questions, in full
Every one of them is on this page before you sign up for anything. The line under each question says what it is for, and what it is deliberately not asking.
The chart that suits the question, and a paragraph under it.
Numbers get the widget built for them. Written answers get grouped into the things people kept saying, with a count on each and every original answer still readable underneath, word for word.
Everything a results page holdsWhat goes wrong with a exit survey
- Sending it during the notice period, when the reference still feels at stake.
- Offering a dropdown of reasons. People pick the nearest acceptable option and you learn nothing you did not already believe.
- Reading them one at a time as they arrive. The finding is in the pattern across a year of leavers, not in any single form.
- Letting the departing person's own manager read the raw responses. If that is going to happen, say so upfront rather than promising anonymity you cannot keep.
Should an exit survey be anonymous?
If you want the real answer, yes. Answers here carry no name unless you ask for one. The tradeoff is that you cannot follow up, which is usually worth it.
When is the best time to send it?
After the last day. Two weeks later gets more candid answers than the final week, and considerably more than the middle of a notice period.
What do we do with the answers?
Read them as a set every quarter rather than one at a time. The same sentence appearing in four different exit surveys is the finding.
Often run alongside this one
eNPS survey
Employee Net Promoter Score borrows the NPS® question and points it at the people who work for you. It is a good measure and an easy one to ruin, because the moment somebody suspects their answer is traceable, you stop measuring morale and start measuring caution.
Employee engagement survey
An engagement survey is the long one, run once or twice a year. Its job is not to produce a number, because eNPS already does that in one question and does it more often. Its job is to tell you which specific parts of working here are holding the number down.
360 feedback survey
A 360 asks the people around somebody the same set of questions: their manager, their peers, the people who report to them, and the person themselves. The gap between how somebody sees their own work and how everybody else sees it is usually the most useful thing on the page.