How to Retain Your Employees With Training: Separation Stage

In our free eBook, Retain Your Employees: 6 Key Stages to Include Training, we show you how offering training opportunities at every stage of the employee life cycle can improve retention.

The Employee Life Cycle

The employee life cycle is an organized way to look at the different stages an employee follows within your organization.

Attraction > Recruitment > Onboarding > Development > Retention > Separation

Most employers focus their training efforts in the Onboarding and Development areas. In previous blogs, we talked about Attraction, Recruitment, Onboarding, Development, and Retention.

Today we’re focusing on the Separation stage.

Definition: The Separation stage is when the employee has decided to leave your organization to move on to something different.

This may seem contradictory to your goal of employee retention. Losing an employee is a difficult situation, especially when you’ve spent a lot of time and resources to develop them, but it’s not completely a negative situation.

In the exit interview, you can gain valuable insights to help improve career development programs and other aspects of the employee experience.

In the exit interview, you want to find out:

• What worked for them?
• What would they change?

In this situation, you want to ensure the employee running the exit interview is properly trained on how to have a positive, constructive discussion with the departing employee.

Exit Interview Tips

• Schedule the meeting for the employee’s last day. Be sure to schedule the meeting and provide an agenda ahead of time so the employee can come prepared with thoughtful answers.
• Plan to have someone other than the employee’s direct manager conduct the meeting. The departing employee may feel more comfortable giving honest feedback to someone who wasn’t involved in their day-to-day experiences.
• Emphasize that everything discussed in this meeting is confidential.
• Be supportive of the employee’s new opportunity.
• Carefully record and then implement the feedback where appropriate.

Exit interviews can be awkward. However, former employees can also be great advocates with potential future employees. Sharing their experiences can help attract new, better-qualified candidates to you in the future. They may even return to your organization for a different opportunity down the line, or pass some referral work to you. Therefore, it’s essential to hold a professional, positive exit interview.

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Want more employee retention tips? Download our free eBook, Retain Your Employees: 6 Key Stages to Include Training.