Looking to Lower Hotel Staff Turnover? Use Employee Exit Surveys

Happy employees are productive and engaged and they carry with them an attitude that spills onto your customer base – something invaluable when you’re running a hotel. Whether you employ 10 people or 10,000, you know these things, but how do you quantify the level of your employees’ engagement and track its improvement? A few unhappy employees may come to you and express concerns, but many that are unhappy may quietly grin and bear the environment while they prepare their resumes. Before you know it, you’re experiencing employee turnover, losing money on the cost of constant training, as well as dissatisfied customers, and wondering what you can do to foster loyal and productive workers.

A great way to reduce turnover is by asking employees leaving the company to complete an employee exit survey. Many will be eager to express opinions that they may not have felt comfortable stating while they were still depending on your company for a paycheck.

The reasons why a person might be dissatisfied at their job can vary dramatically. At times there isn’t much you can do; an ex-employee may not have found their position to be a good fit for their personality. But other times they may feel like there were things you could have changed. They may think that co-workers were not friendly or welcoming, that others – even managers – could get away with performing poorly at their job, or that the overall morale was low. Whatever the reason, the right employee exit survey asks pertinent questions that get to the heart of how employees feel without overwhelming them with a long and tedious document, and has the added advantage of obtaining information you may not be able to obtain through an employee survey.

Correctly administered, employee exit surveys help you identify challenges within your business so that you can work on ways to overcome them. Good exit surveys are usually developed by Ph.D-level Organizational Psychologists and have a focus that goes beyond the traditional corporate office structure to support hospitality-related industries.

In addition, it is important that the company administering your employee exit survey also provides analytical services so you immediately realize both the salient and deeper meanings of the data. And perhaps of greatest importance, you then need a plan of attack to act on the most important findings, and turn data into action. These services help you resolve issues and limit costly employee turnover. After all, rehiring can cost far more than the employee’s annual salary due to lost productivity, recruiting and training costs, and fewer sales caused by lower levels of customer satisfaction.

The best surveys go beyond identifying opportunities for improvement. The best surveys provide analytics and action plans made up of data-based recommendations to reduce employee turnover and help you build an engaged workforce that drives up customer loyalty and financial performance.

NBRI helps companies just like yours become global leaders by combining powerful research with deep analytics. If you’re ready to join their ranks, here’s how we can help: