Exit surveys – A quick guide

Quick contents

• What are exit surveys?
• Why should you issue exit surveys?
• What are the other benefits of exit surveys?
• What happens if you don’t issue exit surveys?
• How can you issue exit surveys?

What Are Exit Surveys?

Exit surveys are your chance to gather feedback from employees who are leaving your organization. More than just a goodbye gesture, exit surveys dig into their experiences, reasons for leaving, and any improvements they believe could make a difference in the future. By asking the right questions, you tap into valuable perspectives that can help shape a stronger, more resilient workplace.

Why Are Exit Surveys Important?

Exit surveys help you understand the trends and underlying reasons behind why employees leave your organization. Though some reasons may be difficult to hear, understanding why they leave–and what might have encouraged them to stay–lets you adjust your strategies, address potential issues, and retain more talent, leading to a healthier, more committed, and engaged workforce.

What Are the Benefits of Exit Surveys?

• Pinpoint your key retention challenges
• Insights gained from exit surveys help reduce costly turnover
• Increase staff engagement and productivity
• Helps your organization shape a positive culture
• Gain insights into manager effectiveness and how to improve
• Provides the opportunity to turn employee recommendations into actionable changes

Understanding what motivated one person to leave – and acting accordingly – could be the key to making sure someone else stays.

How Can You Create an Effective Exit Survey?

The most effective exit surveys combine both numbers and narratives. Quantitative questions allow you to spot patterns in your data and qualitative questions encourage genuine, honest feedback.

Exit Survey Questions

Here are some examples of questions to consider for your exit survey:

• “What specific factors influenced your decision to leave?”
• “How was your relationship with your manager or team?”
• “What changes would make the workplace even better for future employees?”
• “Would you recommend [company] to a friend? Why?”

What happens if you don’t issue exit surveys?

If you're not asking people they they're leaving your organization, you're missing out on crucial information that could help improve retention.

Some reasons can be difficult to hear, but it's only by understanding where your challenges lie that you can make the necessary changes to address them.

How can you issue exit surveys?

Onboarding and exit surveys are available on our WorkBuzz Premium plan. You can quickly and easily issue customised onboarding and exit surveys – alongside your regular pulse and annual surveys – to both new starters and those exiting the business.

By having all your employee feedback from onboarding, engagement and exit surveys on one single platform, you’ll benefit from an improved and consistent experience for your employees. This will also simplify reporting and allow you to easily analyse data across different surveys – so you can spot any trends or areas of concern.

Read more about exit (and onboarding) surveys here.

Why lifecycle surveys matter