10 Restaurant Exit Interview Questions: Stopping the Revolving Door
A healthy turnover rate for any industry averages 10%. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) though, the accommodation and food services industry saw turnover rates increase from 62.5% in 2013 to 72.5% in 2017. Numbers from the National Restaurant Association push those statistics even higher, citing restaurant employee turnover at 72.9%. Upserve reports that 43% of front-of-house employees leave within the first three months of employment and 43% of managers leave within the first year. With so much employee turnover, what’s a restaurant operator to do?
U.S. law doesn’t require you to conduct an exit interview with a departing employee of your restaurant. When you see that revolving door spinning faster than circus plates though, it’s probably time to take a closer look at things. An effective exit interview will provide information that can reduce the tide of additional employee loss. These interviews uncover existing organizational issues which you can correct before they become a widespread problem. Exit Interviews can also offer:
- Insights to solve potential problems for existing employees.
- A way to ensure working relationships end on a good note.
- Valuable Feedback that advances company, employee, and processes forward.
Basic Questions for your Restaurant Exit Interview
Location
Surveys show that a face-to-face interview is the most preferred place for Exit Interviews. This setting allows the interviewer to develop a rapport with the exiting employee. If an in-person interview isn’t possible, a live video chat offers the second-best option.
Interview Timing
While the timing for an Exit Interview may vary from one company to the next, most will choose a time within the last two days of employment. This timeframe gives the employee a chance to wrap up their projects and provide feedback before they’re out the door. Most companies schedule an hour for an interview, and ideally, they shouldn’t go longer than 90 minutes.
Conducting the Interview
If possible, you want to choose an HR staff member to do these interviews and not a direct supervisor. The person holding should be able to listen to feedback without any bias, neither agreeing or disagreeing with the employee’s point or perceptions.
Six Goals of a Restaurant Exit Interview
Every restaurant exit interview should help you identify opportunities for improvement. When you build your interviews with specific goals, you can segment your interview questions by theme. Separating them this way helps you elicit actionable feedback. You should ask some of these questions of every departing employee so that you can pinpoint patterns and problem areas. Paraphrasing responses from each Exit Interview and then placing them into spreadsheet form will ultimately help with data analysis. This method will also help you determine if you should make any improvements, and where to focus.
Goal One: Take the lid off HR-related issues.
Sample exit interview questions:
- What caused you to start searching for a new job?
- Have you shared your concerns with anyone in the company before leaving? Can you tell me about the response you received?
- Can you tell me a bit about your views of our employee onboarding program?
- Do you wish you had known something in the beginning or during employment that wasn’t revealed in the first few days of employment?
- Do you feel that the company offered the opportunities you sought when you first took this position?
Goal Two: Uncover the employee’s perceptions of his or her work.
Sample exit interview questions:
- How do other you feel about the company in general?
- How do you think other employees feel about the company?
- What is the company doing poorly?
Goal Three: Discover insights around leadership styles and their effectiveness.
Sample exit interview questions:
- Can you name the two best things about working with your supervisor?
- Which three people do you credit for making the most positive impact on you and your career while here?
- How do you feel leadership should change and why?
Goal Four: Unearth human resource information around salary, benefits, and perks at competing restaurants.
Sample exit interview questions:
- Do you feel you were compensated similarly to the going rate in the industry?
- If there’s one benefit you could have had that might have kept you from leaving, what would that be?
- What does your new employer provide that prompted you to accept their offer and leave?
Goal Five: Cultivate innovation by soliciting ideas for organizational improvement.
Sample exit interview questions:
- How would you improve the situation that caused you to leave?
- What isn’t the company currently doing, that it should do if things are to improve?
- Do you have ideas that you wish the company had implemented here?
Goal Six: Establish lifelong ambassadors and champions for the organization.
Sample exit interview questions:
- What is the company doing right?
- Can you identify three things you enjoyed about working here?
- What advice do you have for the next person in your position?
For a truly effective restaurant exit interview program, measurement and implementation are essential. Many organizations get the feedback, but don’t take the next steps to implement the changes that provide organizational improvement. When restaurant exit interviews lead to positive change, everyone wins.
Stop the Leak – A Proactive Restaurant Exit Interview
The reasons for an employee departure boils down to a few areas: lack of recognition/feeling appreciated, lack of opportunity or options for growth, personality conflicts, poor supervisor quality, and money—either the need for more or a perceived inequity in compensation.
You can mitigate some departure reasons up front. Some you cannot prevent, but you can lessen. Having regular retention interviews are one answer. These conversations are different from Exit Interviews because the focus is on organizational learning and building employee relationships. Ask current employees these three questions on a regular basis, and you may slow down the speed of that revolving door.
- Are we helping you build your career?
- How are we helping you be more effective in your work?
- Are we helping you have a fulfilling life?
Going Forward
An organization with higher employee retention rates than its competitors can command sizeable market advantages, especially if the top performers stay in their positions as long as possible. On the flip side, research shows that a revolving door of employees predicts low performance. If you don’t have a program for restaurant exit interviews, or cannot cite an example of one policy change or HR initiative, then get started now. Seasoned and skilled employees drive restaurant success. Keep those individuals around, and your success becomes low hanging fruit.
Restaurant exit interviews are just one part of the staffing equation. Learn more about hiring a restaurant dream team in our article below!
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