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How to carry out the Exit Interview study using Startquestion tool?
How to carry out the Exit Interview study using Startquestion tool?
Piotr Sadowski avatar
Written by Piotr Sadowski
Updated over a week ago

Satisfaction surveys targeted at employees are already standard for many companies. After all, they can be the source of knowledge about what is happening in the company and how the organization functions in many areas. In addition to standard satisfaction surveys, you can create so-called exit interview in order to collect opinions from people who leave the company. Thanks to the information obtained in the study, the company can find out the reasons for leaving and how the former employee assesses the functioning of the company. Exit interview research can be created independently, using the Startquestion platform. It is not difficult – you can do it easily step by step, following the instructions below.

Step 1: Introduction

Before you start creating the content of the questionnaire, one thing should be emphasized – the exit interview must guarantee confidentiality to the study participants, and thus be ANONYMOUS.

The first thing you need to do when creating an Exit Interview study is to prepare the introduction to the survey. This is an extremely important element of the questionnaire – it is displayed on the user’s screen at the very beginning and can effectively encourage (or discourage) him or her to take part in the study. The content of admission depends on individual preferences, but it should contain information about the purpose of the study, guarantee of anonymity and approximate time of completion. The introduction to the Exit Interview study, created in Startquestion, may look like this:

Step 2: Preparation of the questionnaire

Creating a questionnaire is the most time-consuming stage of the study. To reduce your effort to a minimum, we have prepared a ready-made study template that you can freely modify to suit your needs.

To make the survey more readable, it can be divided into several parts:

  • The part about the former (already) place of work

Your task will now be to create the content of the questionnaire. After writing the introduction, proceed to creating questions. In this part, the questions are to relate to the feelings and impressions of a former employee related to the position and place of employment. You can ask anything that will help the company discover the source of the problems or the reasons for losing employees. In the case of a question about the reason for leaving (which forms the basis of the survey), you can apply two solutions: create a multiple-choice question listing examples of reasons (necessarily with the possibility of answering other: what?) Or ask about it in an open question. In the second case, spontaneous answers may prove to be more valuable. Other sample questions typical of this study may include:

In our User Guide you can find out what types of questions are available on the Startquestion.com and how to add them. Except that we prepared here some general tips related to the specifics of an exit interview study:

  • use different types of questions – thanks to which the survey will be more diverse and more pleasant to complete,

  • with closed questions, give respondents the opportunity to deepen other types of answers: which? why? what?

  • don’t be afraid of the NPS question! it will allow you to get information on the propensity to recommend your company made from the perspective of the employee (and not as it usually is – the customer).

Remember, not all questions need to be visible to every respondent. Open or more specific questions can only be displayed to selected users. To do this, use the display rules (by clicking the panel: Add another page, and then: Display rules).

Also remember to divide the survey into pages (panel: Add another page). More complex questions should be placed on a separate page – this will help the user with completion and make the survey more readable and aesthetic. You can read about how to change the order of questions and add pages in this entry in our User Guide.

  • The part about the new job position

Information about a new workplace can be useful to your business for several reasons. First of all, in order to obtain information about what conditions the competition offers and what factors were decisive for your employee when changing current job positions. The new workplace section and sample questions might look like this:

For most of the companies, Exit Interview is a way to improve the current situation and changes in the organization so that valuable employees do not leave it. Asking for other companies may not be so important to them, so completing questions in the part about future employment should be optional.

  • The part about employee personal information

We mentioned that the survey is anonymous. But it didn’t change the fact that Exit Interview survey may cover issues such as gender or seniority. It is important not to ask for personal data, such as name and surname, or even a phone number or email address (then the survey will cease to be anonymous). At this point, however, it is worth asking about those issues that will later be used to filter the results (e.g. in order to obtain information on what are the reasons for leaving employees with short experience and which with many years, etc.).

Step 3: survey distribution

This process can be carried out in two ways:

1. by asking a question about the region and then creating a filter and alert based on it or without asking about the region – by creating a prefilled link to complete the survey,

2. by creating an additional segment with the region on the list of respondents and filtering data on this basis.

We strongly recommend the first solution, so we’ll focus on it in this guide. At the end, however, will also be included how to send a survey using the previously created data segment.

  • question about region + filter + alert

The assumption here is as follows: the survey is carried out in a large company that has been divided into regions / branches (e.g. provinces). A specific person (e.g. director/manager) is responsible for the work of each region. Therefore, the results of the survey completed by employees departing from a given department should only reach the supervisor. The easiest way to do this is by asking at the beginning of the questionnaire a simple single-choice question, in which the respondent will indicate in which branch or province he worked:

How to do it?

1. The first step is behind us – it was to create a single-choice question asking for the area in which the respondent worked.

2. Creating filters – to enable sending notifications about the completion of the survey only to selected people, you must first filter the collected results. To do this, go to the Results tab and then: Filters.

There, by clicking on the panel: Create a new filter, we complete the required information. The filter should be titled like the name of the region or province. We select the option to filter information: Based on the answers, and select the first from the list of questions. The answer to the name of the region must be marked.

We create as many filters as our company has branches or regions. Thanks to this, our results will be divided according to which department the respondent comes from, and we can move on to the next step.

  • Creating alerts

We have already created filters for each region, so we move on to the next stage – setting notifications of survey completion, targeted at specific superiors.

To do this, go to the tab: Create, then: Alerts and webhooks, and next create a new alert. He can take the name of a given region or department or, for example, the name of the person to whom the reports are to be sent. In the section: Condition of the alert, in this situation, select: Filter result, and then from the drop-down list select the appropriate filter for the department, previously created by us.

The content of the message directed to the superior of a given department can be freely edited.

And that’s all. You can see that using the region question and filtering information is a simple and intuitive way. However, we will show you one more option.

How to construct a survey link with a prefiled region?

Sometimes the question about the department in which the respondent worked is unnecessary, because we already have such an information. In this case, you don’t need to create a new survey without asking for the region – just use the link to the survey with a prefill, i.e. with a predefined answer to the first question.

How to create a link?

By generating a link with a prefabricated region, you can provide answers to survey questions using the parameters in the survey URL. The standard exit interview survey link may look like this (we can copy it by going to the tab Collecting -> Link to the survey):

To pass a parameter in the URL regarding the region in which the responder worked (answer to question # 1), this link may take the following form:

Then the respondent by opening the link to the survey will receive a questionnaire in which North region is automatically selected.

Values ​​of the parameter q e.g. 1,2,3 … mean each subsequent answer where 1 is the first of the available answers, 2 – the second, 3 – the third, etc.

2) data segment + filter + alert

If for some reason you don’t want to ask about the region in the survey (e.g. we want the respondent to have a greater sense of anonymity or we want the questionnaire to be as short as possible) we can filter the data in a different way. It requires a bit more effort on the part of the person creating the surveys.

The first step will be to create the previously mentioned data segment. The easiest way to do this is to create a list of respondents (email addresses) in an Excel program and add a region next to each name. It may look like this:

Then add the list of respondents along with the created segment to the Startquestion tool. To do this, go to the tab Share --> Send via e-mail. Then choose the option: Import from file and attach the previously created document.

Respondents can also be entered manually, adding information about the region, but it is definitely more time consuming.

After adding the list of respondents, as in the case of the first method, we move to creating filters. However, this time when creating the filter we choose the option: Based on the respondent’s data:

We do so with each subsequent region – so we create as many filters as there are units in our organization.

The next step is to create alerts again. This time, we proceed exactly the same as for the first method (Results -> Alerts), creating a new alert based on the previously created filter and sending a notification to the previously selected employee (supervisor of the given region).

Step 4: Analysis of the results

Your task has come to an end – you have created an exit interview questionnaire, which is ready to be sent to respondents, and in addition you set alerts that direct the survey results to the right people. Congratulations!

Both you and those responsible for analyzing the test results can now go on to filter the information collected or generate automatic reports. In the search for the best solutions on how to analyze the collected data, we recommend the articles contained in the Startquestion Guidebook, specifically in the section: Analysis of results.

We wish You good luck!

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