Moral Issues with Employee Exit Surveys

Exit surveys are becoming far more common within customer satisfaction marketing. While tracking satisfaction changes is useful, it is often the people that have defected to other companies that need to have the most effect on your company’s decision making, since they are the ones that have decided another company has more to offer than your own. Companies are always looking for ways to stop customers from defecting and trying to improve the company.

But it’s not only customers that companies need to prevent from defecting. For every employee that quits the company, as much as three times the person’s salary is being invested into the person that hires them. Learning why employees are leaving may be just as helpful as learning why customers leave, which is why running employee exit surveys may be in your best interest.

One of the only problems with employee exit surveys, however, is that there is a moral component that may play a role – namely, that employees may be able to be identified depending on when the data is collected, whether there is any quantitative information, etc. Employees need to be able to be honest, but if their data can be discovered it can also be used (or held) against them, and that is something that simply cannot happen if the company wants to be morally accountable for the data they collect. Luckily, there are a variety of presumably easily solutions to this problem that the company can institute if they want to be morally accountable to the employees: Only review data in increments.

For example, review data only after 20 new people have filled it out, or after 6 months, etc. This will make it harder to locate specific employees that may have left the company. Have someone outside the company or someone in a non-supervisory role review qualitative answers.

This will reduce the chance that someone is called out or that someone identifiable is mentioned. Put the dates into time frames.

For example, rather than show the employee that filled out the survey on date X, the data should only show everyone that took the survey within a range of dates. As long as you find a way to reduce the chances that someone figures out who the employee was that left the responses, there are a few moral issues that come from taking the survey. Without this, however, you are far more likely to put the employees at privacy risk, and you may not get accurate responses.