There are reasons why practices get started things – the origin stories usually make sense. But for some things, we’ve lost the original purpose – or that purpose is no longer being served – yet the practice remains, because “we’ve always done it that way.” This is especially true in organizational life. Let’s look at three of these practices (exit interviews, status meetings, and performance reviews) so you can examine if they are helping, how you might make them better, or if you should eliminate them.
Exit Interviews
The idea of an exit interview is understandable. If we find out why people are leaving, we might identify things we could improve that would reduce talent turnover. Fewer exits lead to fewer exit interviews.
The problem is that for the person leaving it is too late – they are already leaving. And, while we might be able to gather some useful information, is it enough?
The clever idea of the “stay interview” allows HR to be a bit more proactive and hear what people like about the organization, team, culture and more, but it misses the mark too without another mechanism in place.
Too often the problem with the exit and stay interviews is that leaders see that as an HR role – and not something they need to think about. In reality, leaders need to have regular conversations with their teams and team members. Leaders need to have a sense of how people are doing, how they are feeling, and what they need. When leaders practice empathy, they are learning what they can do to support their people and improve retention. More than that, those conversations themselves build trust and increase psychological safety – both of which will further improve retention and reduce the need for HR to spend time on exit interviews.
Status Meetings
Status meetings have likely been around as long as people worked together on different projects. It makes sense – when everyone knows what others are doing, they can support them – and perhaps offer help. The problem is that status meetings often get bloated in time and purpose. Trying to include social time or other communication purposes that cause status meetings to get a bad name and become a time suck.
I am all for connection and communication, and if your status meetings are working for you, great. Make sure everyone shares that same view of their value. Ask the group if these meetings are meeting their needs and if not, how they could be improved.
If they aren’t working, maybe it is time to can the status meeting and consider asynchronous approaches. Create active instant message channels, institute a short update template for everyone to complete, or ask the team how they would like to stay updated on each other’s work and progress.
Performance Reviews
How could I write this article and not talk about performance reviews? It is hard to argue with the initial intent of performance reviews – to help people gauge how they are doing and what they could do to improve. Unfortunately, the potential (but not inevitable) problems are clear and have been experienced by most people. It is a perfect organizational case of intended outcomes not being met.
Due to the problems and bad reputation of the performance review, many organizations have abolished them. While that intention is also understandable, it can be equally problematic.
While we might choose to eliminate the annual/semi-annual performance review, doing that often further reduces the amount of performance feedback people receive.
Again, if your performance development (a phrase I prefer to performance management) processes are working for everyone, great. But if not, whatever you change it to, make sure it allows/supports/encourages leaders and team members to have more frequent and helpful conversation about performance progress and suggested next steps. Here is a short article to help you think about this.
Not About Right or Wrong
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these practices. But there might be much wrong with how they are working in your organization or on your team. Now might be the time to reconsider one or more of them – to make sure they are serving everyone. And if they aren’t, work together to get back to the intent behind them so these practices (or their replacements) serve everyone well.
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