Organisations like to do exit questionnaires and interviews with people who are leaving the organisation voluntarily. They want to understand why people have chosen to leave their job, whether there are any problems or any way in which they can improve their talent development processes or pipelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, there is no upside to this for the (former) employee. They are leaving or have left\u2014they don’t owe the labour of the questionnaire or interview to to the former employer in any contractual sense. Also, there is a considerable downside risk. If someone says something damning or (perhaps unintentionally) disruptive at such an interview, it can burn bridges for future partnerships or a future return to that organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The risk is stacked against the employee and in favour of the employer. So, it seems only reasonable that a sensible employee would refuse such a request. Perhaps, therefore, there needs to be some motivation to compensate for the risk. I don’t think that it is unreasonable for the former employer to pay the former employee a non-token amount to do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We baulk at this. Why should we pay<\/em> for this? Well, if we value the information, we should be able to work out a reasonable monetary value for that information\u2014how much would our organisation gain from knowing that piece of information? We seem very reluctant to quantify in monetary terms the cost of information, probably because (unlike a physical thing<\/em>) it is literally intangible, and so ought,\u00a0surely<\/em> to cost nothing. There are exceptions. Companies subscribe to market intelligence briefings. But, overall, we are reluctant to do this. One exception is in management accounting, which has a well-developed idea of doing a cost-benefit analysis of gathering information. Sometimes, information just isn’t worth knowing\u2014the difference it would make to our decision making is outweighed by the cost of getting to know the information. This still jars with a very human understanding of information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Organisations like to do exit questionnaires and interviews with people who are leaving the organisation voluntarily. They want to understand why people have chosen to leave their job, whether there are any problems or any way in which they can improve their talent development processes or pipelines. But, there is no upside to this for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[12,20,63,58],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2818"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2905,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions\/2905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}