Rethinking the Exit Interview

We all know that employee turnover can be extremely costly for organizations.  Yet, we also recognize that many firms struggle with employee retention.  Managers sometimes cannot determine why people are leaving. They try to use exit interviews to learn about the conditions creating turnover, but they fail to arrive at concrete conclusions.  Often, departing employees hold back in those exit interviews, rather than disclosing completely the reasons for their move to a different company. 

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta explain a different approach to learning about what drives people to switch jobs.  They write,

As we noted earlier, exit interviews can be a bit of a joke. People usually assume it’s too late to address why they are leaving—so they say safe things and move on.  We’ve found that it’s more productive to interview employees about their previous roles soon after they’ve started something new. That’s essentially what we did in our research. By closely examining the pushes and pulls that compelled each person’s most recent job move, you can better understand what might motivate your employees to make another change soon—and, conversely, what might make them choose to stick around. You can frame these talks with employees as your way of identifying important features of their experience so that with their input you can create a workplace that they’ll want to “rehire” each day.

This strategy makes a good deal of sense to me.  These conversations can be useful in two key ways.  First, managers can get to know their new employees - what motivates and drives them, what they care deeply about, and what they love (and don't love) about their work.  Second, managers can begin to detect themes across their employee population.  What type of people are attracted to the organization?  Why are people self-selecting this company?  What, if anything, made them hesitant about taking a new job here?  The answers to these questions can shape a company's recruitment and retention strategies.  Finally, I would argue that the answers to some of these questions may emerge during the interview process.  Yet, managers are often focused on selecting the best candidate, rather than thinking about the interview process as an opportunity to learn about what motivates people to switch jobs.  Mining the interviews for this additional information could be very useful. 

Will Using AI at Work Damage Your Reputation?

How does using AI at work shape others' perceptions of you?  Could you enhance or damage your reputation by leveraging AI extensively?  Jessica Reif , Richard Larrick, and Jack Soll have published a fascinating new paper on this topic titled "Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI."   The scholars conducted a series of experiments to examine how people perceive those that use AI extensively at work.   The authors concluded, "This work provides experimental evidence that people incur a social evaluation penalty for using AI tools at work. This generates a dilemma for employees: The productivity gains they can achieve with AI tools carry a social cost." 

Duke Fuqua Insights reported on this study's findings: "The study found that employees judge colleagues who use AI as less competent and lazier, and recruiting managers may act based on this perception by penalizing job candidates who rely on AI to complete tasks." On the other hand, if the manager also uses AI to enhance efficiency and productivity, this social penalty goes away.

Will these attitudes about AI shift over time? The authors think so. They write, "Perceptions of technology tend to be influenced by its age, and thus the social evaluation penalties we documented are likely to shift as AI tools become more commonplace and organizational norms around their use continue to develop."

What do I take away from this research?  What is the practical implication?   For me, I recommend that employees explain their rationale for using AI to enhance productivity and efficiency.  You have to make your case to the skeptics in your organization and provide evidence of the how it improves workplace performance.  Don't just assume others recognize its merits.  However, you also don't want to disparage colleagues and managers who might be resistant, or who might perceive AI users as lazy or incompetent.  Give them concrete evidence of its benefits, rather than making conceptual arguments.  Invite them to collaborate with you on projects that involve the use of AI.  Help them see firsthand how it can help them.  Finally, don't downplay the risks and problems associated with AI use.  Acknowledge the challenges associated with hallucinations and biases.  Explain how you try to address those risks in your work.  

Deep Curiosity to Solve Hard Problems

Recently, AMD CEO Lisa Su spoke at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. She described how leaders should be aiming to provide opportunities for their people to tackle hard problems. She argued that you won't be sure they can achieve those ambitious goals, but your job is to create those opportunities and provide them support. For employees, their goal should be to have an intense curiosity about solving tricky problems and an interest in exploring new challenges. Together, a leader looking to provide challenges and an employee with curiosity can be a perfect match. Here's an excerpt from Lisa Su's interview:

Well, I think the most important thing for all of us is to have a deep curiosity of just solving problems. That’s my view of the world. When I think about… In the early part of my career, some of the most difficult things, like the first product I ever worked on was a product that was a microprocessor, and we were just about to announce the processor and nothing worked. I mean, the chip did not work. We didn’t know why it didn’t work, but the company was about to announce it. And you think, “Oh, that’s terrible.” That’s very stressful. But actually, what it is it allows you to really galvanize teams on really taking, opening up every ounce of creativity you have to figure out, okay, how are we going to figure out why is this not working and how do we bring it, move the projects forward?

And so that’s what I view as the beauty of hard problems. You can work on anything in life, but when you work on a really hard problem, or in a company context, when you work on, let’s call it the most important projects, you can garner an incredible amount of just resources, creativity, focus that will allow you to do something that you wouldn’t imagine possible. That’s what I believe is the most important thing managers do or leaders do. What leaders do is they actually bring teams together to do something that nobody thought was possible. And that’s what I enjoy about the world that we’re in, is that you’re working on problems that are super interesting and quite impactful to the industry, and you’re also working on something that someone hasn’t done before.