Professor Carl Maertz | How Can Companies Retain High-performing Employees? Good Data is Key!

In a recent paper, Professor Carl Maertz and his colleagues introduce an innovative exit interview protocol that can provide consistent, high-quality data on why employees quit. This approach can better inform managers about how to keep valued contributors.

Within this protocol, leavers are asked to identify all their reasons for leaving from a comprehensive list of commonly reported reason categories, ranging from a need for relocation to problems with performance appraisals. These categories were carefully developed in a previous study and refined in the current study to be sufficiently complete and distinct in their implications for management.

From the reason categories they choose, respondents then indicate which they consider ‘truly important’ in their decision to quit. Finally, from these, they are asked to rank their 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd most important reasons.

To use this data most effectively and efficiently, managers should focus on creating interventions that mitigate the top-ranked reasons of high-performing quitters, which are less frequently mentioned by low-performing quitters.

Professor Maertz hopes that this exit interview protocol will help us better understand voluntary turnover generally. His approach allows managers to better assess reasons and their importance, enables the accumulation of standardised turnover data across organizations, and ultimately increases the diagnostic potential of exit interviews or surveys.