The Voluntary Employee Exit Process: The often ignored part of building a relationship

It is a scene that plays out every day in many organizations across the world. An employee walks into his or her supervisor’s office (or emails him or her in the age of remote working) and lets them know that they are tendering their resignation after serving the notice period specified in the offer letter when they joined. 

How the supervisor responds then shapes the employee experience to a large extent.

And, how the supervisor responds is dependent on the relationship they shared and the conversations they have had until this point. 

It is often said when employees join they join organizations, but when they leave they leave managers. While that may not always be true, it cannot be denied that the immediate manager or supervisor plays an outsized role.

The importance of having an exit process that is empathetic and treats every employee as a human being is critical. When a person is heard and acknowledged on their way out they can act as ambassadors and share their positive stories with prospective candidates who reach out to them. When a person is treated with disrespect or when the supervisor or Human Resource representative lets the process take precedence over human factors it can lead to an irreparable damage to the relationship between parties

According to research by Everett Spain and Boris Groysberg, many companies don’t even conduct exit interviews. Some collect exit interview data but don’t analyze it. Some analyze it but don’t share it with the senior line leaders who can act on it. Only a few collect, analyze, and share the data and follow up with action. They suggest having interviews conducted by second- or third-line managers. Make exit interviews mandatory for at least some employees. And because standard interviews enable you to spot trends, but unstructured ones elicit unexpected insights, consider combining the two approaches in semistructured interviews.

A strategic Exit Interview program provides insight into what employees are thinking, reveals problems in the organization, and sheds light on the competitive landscape.

How should a manager behave when an employee resigns?

Don’ts

1. The first thing a manager should not try to do is make it about himself or herself. Resist the urge of saying “How could you do this to me?” Doing so makes the employees defensive and probably close up.

2. The manager should not, on the other hand suppress, their own emotions. Acknowledging it is important. Especially for first time manager it can lead to self-doubt. Talking to a coach (if available) or a senior professional could be a way to deal with it.  

3. Do not blame the employee for being ungrateful

4. Do not treat the employee as a traitor  out to share trade secrets with competitors., cutting them out of team meetings during the remainder of their notice period

Do’s 

1. Listen to the employee without judgement. Take their word at face value. In an example a startup entrepreneur shared with me, when he told his employer that he was leaving to pursue an idea to build a business, his manager did not believe him. They suspected that it was just an excuse and he was off to join some competitor. The entrepreneur shared that though his employment was okay enough, this lack of trust soured the relationship with his former employer

2. The manager should realise that every resignation is an opportunity - an opportunity to relook at root causes where it broke down and to truthfully share that with the organization so that such mistakes are minimised and reduced in the future. Often these will trigger a need for self-reflection and requires a degree of self awareness for a manager to reflect on his or her own behaviour that might have led to a breakdown in the relationship. This would give data for possible development needs for the manager. 

3. Listen to the employee’s needs during the notice period. Do they want to serve out the full notice period or adjust the remainder of their leaves against some portion of the notice period. Organizations in India specifically have long notice periods of two to three months, which in my opinion is not needed for a majority of roles in most organizations. However if the employee has a rare skill that is not readily available in the market then retaining such an employee should have been the first priority. If their new employer wants them to join early and is willing to buy out the notice period, then trying to not let that happen and forcing the employee to work is counterintuitive - and yet we come across so many cases of employers trying to do the same thing. It makes the exit process difficult and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of both parties

4. Managers and employers should look at it as the continuance of an existing relationship and not as the end of one. If organizations look at themselves as ‘learning academies’ where people come to learn and perform - they will look at their ex-employees as alumni and brand ambassadors. This shift of thinking should be driven by the very top of the organization. Treating alumni well can lead to tangible gains like business  (something that management consulting firms like McKinsey are famed for) as well as acting as referrers of great talent (hereby saving recruitment related costs) that the company needs. People tend to trust the opinion of ex-employees more than others as they are seen as more credible than other sources.

   

The bottom line is that managing the exits of employees is as important, if not more , as the entry of people into an organization.

One way organizations can do this is creating a cross functional team that looks at simplifying processes to make exits across the organization, and empowering managers to take decisions that are beneficial in the long term interests of the departing employee as well as the organization. It needs to comprise CXOs like the COO, the CTO, the CFO and the CHRO.

This team should also hold development sessions for managers on the dos and don'ts on dealing with their people when they submit their resignations. In fact, it should be a part of every new manager orientation and development. For that the leadership itself has to come up  with a philosophy on how they view departing employees and that then can percolate within the organization. 

Post courtesy Randstad Risesmart

Employee Advocates for Employee Communications

Image via WikipediaOne of the oft-ignored aspect of employee engagement is employee communication. Organizations just don't treat it as priority. I asked this question on my facebook page - and three people have answered yes to the question I posed so far.
So why is that the case?
Primarily it is because employee communication is not thought of as a discipline by HR professionals as external communications is thought of by the Marketing professionals. Most HR communications are restricted to garishly colored emails with 20 size font letters. Or managers are expected to do the bulk of the communications to their supervisors - and we know how that goes.
The question needs to be rethought - and organizations need to look at their employees as an internal community they need to "converse with" and not to "talk/sell to".
So here's my free advice to organizations on how to better "communicate with employees"

1. Listen. Give tools to your employees to make them heard. Use ideation platforms, question and answers, wikis, internal blogs for employees to connect with each other. Figure out what has their attention and time.
2. Acknowledge. When someone contributes a great idea - borrow it and give him/her credit. Make that employee an owner of that idea and support him/her to implement it. The same away acknowledge the employees who contribute answers and contribute to building the knowledge base.
3. Understand. With the data generated in the first two steps organizations can figure out (using Thomas Gladwell's Tipping point lingo) who are the mavens, connectors and salesmen. This would be possible using Social Network Analysis tools.
4. Engage. Using the data from the above step organizations should figure out the highly engaged employees who are mavens, connectors and salesmen and empower them as internal advocates (using the methodology of social influence marketing) 

The thought behind this method of employee communication is that influential employees would be trusted and co-creating a message along with them would be a better way to communicate than just using posters and emails that are likely to be ignored by employees.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Thoughts on Social HR (gautamblogs.com)
• Survey: Email, Intranets Top Employer, Employee Communication (webpronews.com)
• How to Connect With Your Employees Using Social Media, Email and Some Common Sense (socialtimes.com)

Thoughts on Social HR

I have earlier blogged about how HR can use social media to become HR 2.0 or to build talent communities, but when my twitter buddies @prem_k and @sameerpatel were discussing "social" everything including "social HR" I realised that there are more implications of social HR than I have earlier articulated.
So how is it different?
What I had blogged about earlier was how HR departments and professionals could leverage social media to achieve their goals.
But with "Social HR" I am potentially thinking a very disruptive thought.
Can employees and HR professionals and management folks together work together using social media - to do work that was only done by HR people?
Let's think about the aspects of HR work and what can be made "social"

• Recruitment: How about talent show where prospective candidates perform tasks and are voted up or down by current employees - and final selection of the finalists by the hiring managers. These tasks could be results or the process of doing the role itself. It could be text based, photographic or video based too. These folks can be pre-screened based on their interests and participation on the company's external communities. Of course some roles would be more suited to this than others.
• Compensation & Benefits: How about a Quora like internal question and answer site that helps users to resolve each others queries on how to craft their own "cafeteria compensation" plan. And a group voting site on rewards and recognition for fellow employees.
• HR Processes: This has been done. Dell employees use an internal platform to give ideas to improve systems and processes.
• Employee Engagement: We all know that an internal corporate social network can leverage connections that exist between employees and also help in serendipitous discovery of new knowledge and innovation by getting people to collaborate and discover new people whom they might not ever have met face to face. Here's a short 5 slide presentation I put together to help illustrate my point

Social Employee engagement - Using social media tools for Employee Engagement and HR

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

• Learning & Development: Employee engagement and collaboration helps people to learn from fellow employees. These tools can also be used by trainers to add more to the classroom and create a community of learners who can continue to share experiences and be a support group as they implement learnings in their workplace

So are you ready for the social HR?
I thought so :-)

The Social Media Celebrity Employee and Employment Branding

This is a great article on a trend that we will see more and more. Currently, it's media organizations who face this situation - but as more and more organizations move to being content and community creators - leveraging social media we'll see this happening in more and more across industries.

As business move from social media marketing to becoming social-enabled business - more and more organizations will grapple with these issues. Also see earlier post on "when your employee brand ambassadors leave"

Dealing With Employees Who Are Social Media Celebrities

The irony in most cases is that the employee attained “celebrity” status in large part because of the company he or she worked for. The company name backing them gave immediate authority to the public.

The employee’s own abilities, however, took the company name and endowed authority to the level that made it truly beneficial to both the company and the employee. They need each other more than they think they do.

The pressure social media and employee celebrities bring to the workplace is mostly positive. It changes the dynamic from “human resources” to “talent management” and that’s really a good thing for everyone.

Businesses will get better people, employees will be better people, and customers reap the benefits from the whole arrangement. Employee celebrities will be viewed as a threat in some companies, but they’ll be rock stars in other companies. Social media gives every organization yet one more thing to consider for the future of their business.

The social business employee manifesto

I posted this presentation based on my blog post Social Business employee Manifesto a couple of months ago.

Do take a look and leave your comments :)

The social business employee manifesto

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

Building Employee Engagement leveraging Enterprise 2.0

BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”

“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.

“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”

Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”

“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam

“Yes true” agreed Sumit

“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”

“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.

“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”

“Such as…?”

“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”

“Really…?”

“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”

“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”

“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”