‘Cockroaches of Human Resources Practice’?

Abstract

Human Resources (HR) departments within organizations traditionally conduct exit interviews with those employees who are leaving voluntarily. The aim is to gather information through questions relating to working conditions, salary, benefits, career advancement opportunities, quality/quantity of workload and relationships with line managers and colleagues. The accepted wisdom, that such information forms a valuable source of knowledge management for the organization, is being increasingly questioned by sceptics who believe that such information may be distorted by the employee’s fear of the impact it may have on their references or on their work colleagues who are remaining and by the fact that the HR department may determine the questions asked in the interviews and so skew the results. A study was undertaken to examine whether or not there is any relationship between exit interviews and knowledge management and the nature of any such relationship that may exist. The typical characteristics of the exit interview were seen to fall into four types: those that are reactive in nature; those conducted by a Personnel Officer in a face to face interview; those that are analyzed to a minimum extent according to a preset format designed by the HR department; and those that capture only a small amount of explicit knowledge. It is suggested that future exit interviews could play a more important role in the knowledge management culture by including the ability to generate new and creative ideas from information, to create trusting relationships with colleagues, to share ideas and information with others, to separate the relevant from the irrelevant information; to perceive connections between disparate pieces of information, to organize information and ideas, and to learn and develop continuously. It is concluded that exit interviews will only survive if they succeed in shedding their traditional format and structure and adapt in such a way as to capture the sort of explicit and tacit knowledge that can assist the organization in achieving its mission.