A friend of mine recently quit his job and mentioned that he had an exit interview. He said, “I doubt it’s going to change anything”. This discussion started a reflection, and here I am now, challenging my HR friends’ status quo!

Following my reflection and as an hors-d’oeuvre to this article, I wanted to test the waters on the matter. I created two small (and absolutely non-scientific) surveys on Primos Populi’s Facebook page. One was made for non-HR employees, others for people in Human Resources and managers. Here’s what I gathered:

The difference in perception is nothing too surprising. People who quit their job have much less visibility on what happens next. For my part, following my last voluntary departure, I know for a fact that some changes took place 3 months later or so, following the recommendations I made in my exit interview.

The current state of things.

I kinda have to hit the nail on the head concerning the exit interviews. I’ll do it a little further in the article, but let’s start by taking a look at the trends on the market.

Some companies don’t do exit interviews

There, that’s simple. I’m not sure if it’s very common. It happened to me once. The CEO asked me “Where are you going?” and that was it. What’s not representative of the market is the fact that, after kindly asking him to be discreet about the company I was leaving for, I went back to my place and saw that the CEO sent an email to the whole organization, letting them know I was leaving for Company X. Nice guy. That’ll also teach me not to be transparent.

It is not always a matter of nonchalance or bad faith. I once heard a manager say “People come and go, and that’s how the market works”. What an effective way to get rid of any kind of responsibility! People are going to leave anyway, why try to improve the place? It’s our destiny, we might as well embrace it. I’ll push this argument a little further: clients also leave companies, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Why then should we provide customer service?

I’m fairly certain that these companies generally see departures as such: it wasn’t a good fit, she had problems, he wasn’t really performing, she was a difficult person anyway, etc.

Aren’t you mesmerized by the fact that those who left by themselves were all part of the problem? But the company wasn’t. You know, I had a few ex-girlfriends who left me in the past. Do you know what they all had in common? ME. Just a little opportunity for some introspection here…

In sum, it’s not exactly far fetched to think that companies that don’t do exit interview just don’t care about their employees. Not for those who quit, and not for those who remain. 

I’m well aware that this last statement goes against the title of this post. But let’s continue, shall we?

Many companies do exit interviews

Now that’s a little better: companies that can put their ego aside and want to improve. Very well, and it’s much to their credit. Especially organizations that have a real will to change things.

According to the survey above (which isn’t representative) and knowing what I know about companies in general (which is a little more representative but also biased), a lot of companies will take note of the problems, but won’t do anything to change things.

It appears to be a common practice but that’s taken quite lightly. I don’t know if organizations have any idea of the impact it can have to ask people what needs to be changed and do nothing about it.

While everyone is different, if a problem is serious enough for someone to leave, it is likely that others are affected as well. Especially when it comes to a draconian manager, harassment, important problems with a client, important problems with a team member.

If we meet with people, that we acknowledge the problem and do nothing about it, the situation can and will easily turn into a cynicism generator.

The real problem with exit interviews

My real problem with exit interviews is the fact that problems are acknowledged only once someone announced he’s going to leave. Oh now, all of a sudden, we care about what this employee was going through!

And that is the problem. If you suddenly care about your employees only when they leave, you deserve your turnover rate. And since I might not have been clear, here it is, on a large image.

So, I have a few questions for you:

• What are your managers doing? It’s their role to care for people, way before HR should get involved.
• Do your managers get the necessary coaching so that they can take ownership of their employees’ well being?
• Is there a collaboration between managers and HR? Are the problem acknowledged in the exit interview already known by HR, or are they a surprise every time?
• Do your managers have the necessary power to fix those problems before they turn into a departure?

Aiming at making exit interviews useless

Even if the departure is for health reasons, diverging interests, career development, none of these should go unknown by a good manager who cares for his colleagues.

For my part, I try to develop a trusting relationship with my employees. I know their aspirations, their pain points, I make sure I know where they project themselves in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, I know their next step, and I do whatever I can to help them get there, even if their next step will get them out of the company.

The necessity for an exit interview will always represent a red flag for me, as it suggests that the relationships between managers and employees aren’t transparent, that the employees don’t receive the attention and the support they need in order to grow in the organization.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

A lot of people asked me how I came up with the idea of creating this survey, and what was its purpose. This is my answer to them.

It all started with my first steps in the labour market

I’ve been on the labour market for 18 years now, and of course, like a lot of you, I have witnessed multiple approaches and attitudes when it comes to management. Not just from my bosses, but other people’s bosses as well.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the kind of bosses I’ve seen in action, in no particular order:

• bosses who allow bullying and refuse to let the victim move to another team
• bosses who don’t mind their best people leaving since that’s how the market works
• bosses who boast about how much money they make to employees with a low wage
• bosses who break labour laws
• bosses who fire people every time something goes wrong
• bosses who harass random employees until they suffer burnout and leave
• bosses who insult employees in front of their colleagues
• bosses who let clients abuse their employees
• bosses who let their employees take important decisions
• bosses who leverage people’s potential
• bosses who pressure new employees to snitch
• bosses who decide with whom it is OK to talk to at work
• bosses who promise the world and never intend to deliver
• bosses who put shackles on motivated and ambitious employees
• bosses who read their employees’ chat logs on a daily basis
• bosses who scream at people
• bosses who trust people
• bosses who try to destroy people’s reputations after they resign
• bosses who would eat babies if eating babies was profitable

There are a lot of kind of bosses and managers. What’s sad is that in my previous list, the bosses with a positive attitude are far outweighed by the other negative kind, and the nice ones weren’t even doing anything truly special but being decent human beings.

Hold my coffee, I got this

There was a time in my career — not too long ago — when I could feel that I was getting dangerously close to my tolerance threshold to abusive or retrograde boss-employee relationships. Strangely (or not), it coincided with my decision to focus on bringing humanity back to the core of the labour market and of the work place. If no one (in my immediate environment, at the very least) was willing to fix this mess, I would be the one to do so.

So, I was on my way to be the change I wanted to see in the world, and all I needed to start was a company that wanted to put their logo on that. I started writing on different mediums about the kind of progressive and human-centric environment I wanted to work in, until I found a company that had similar views on the matter. Where do I sign?

Since then, my replies to job offers on LinkedIn pretty much evolved from “Thanks, I’m not sure I want to be a Scrum Master anymore” to “Thanks for your consideration, but I’m busy changing the world”. Whatever I’m trying in my workplace, I expose to the outside world, and whatever I’m learning from the outside world, I try in my workplace. I am set to create such an example of people-centric leadership and management, that the labour market couldn’t just ignore it anymore. It’s still a work in progress. But this is my life now, and I’ve never been happier.

Brainstorm and inception

I was put in contact with Edda Pizzati, who founded a company called Humains, (comma included, that’s their brand) and that focuses on recruiting atypical candidates for job opportunities. There was an obvious and instantaneous professional connection between us, to the point where we just decided we should start a project together, and we came up with the idea of this survey. All that in one hour in a coffee shop in the Old Port of Montreal.

The discussion went from talking about why people leave their job, to what we could do to make people happier. And we thought that getting an idea of how bad (or good) things are as of now might be a good start.

Now I have never done a study like that before, especially not something with statistics. A good way to figure out if you can do something is to do it, so we threw a few ideas on paper. After a few passes, we had a clearer view of what we could achieve.

• We wanted to understand how people perceive their work environment and their manager;
• We wanted to understand what people expect from their manager;
• We wanted to understand what makes them keep their job;
• We wanted to find out if there were any correlation between all the demographics and variables we could use in the survey;
• And we also wanted to show to the surveyees, through the wide range of available answers, that management isn’t all command and control, and human-centric approaches do exist in management;

Designing the survey

It was clear from the start that we would share the data of the survey publicly. I don’t actually feel we’re doing this for ourselves, I’m hoping other people can find value in these results. With this in mind, we wanted a tool that was free to use. Google Forms felt like a very accessible and easy enough tool to use.

I drafted a series of questions that grew every now and then. I based my question on my own management experience. Situations where I was challenged, or where I was drastically avoiding traditional reflexes. In the survey description, I wrote that we don’t pretend there are good or bad answers to make sure people wouldn’t self-censor. In reality, of course, there are tons of management styles, and we all have our preferences.

I wanted to offer the broadest choice of answers, from very conservative to very progressive. Many times, I went to the extremes, not only because I wanted to go beyond what I’m used to and what I know, but also in hope that people would actually challenge their perception of their work environment. One of the first question I asked was what perception people have of their manager, and I asked it again at the end of the survey, to see if answering the survey itself had changed their initial perception. I’m excited to see the resulting statistics of this experiment.

Concerning the upcoming survey results

The survey results will be shared in an upcoming article on LinkedIn, on my collaborative blog Primos Populi, as well as on Humains,‘s blog. Depending on how much interesting information we gather, it could come in multiple separate articles. We will try to present the results in a nice and appealing way, maybe an infographic of some sort. If any of you have a tool for this that’s free to use, please let us know in the comments!

Also, know that the resulting .CSV file will be available for download to everyone.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

But we are actually turning the tides of traditional management, though. And since we are a small team, it’s an ideal environment to test the waters – HA! – with some innovative management and leadership approaches.

A Matter of Principles for Us Managers

Before going deeper into what we’re doing and how we do it, you need to know about the managers in the Product and Technology department at Marine Press, and what they believe. There are five of us. We don’t always think alike and we’re not all full-time managers. Some are executives, some are still working hands-on with the products. However, we pretty much agree on the following principles:

Principle 1: People = Awesome

The most important guiding principle of Modern Agile: Make People Awesome. A manager’s job is to take care of people. Not just the employees “under them” (I really don’t like to consider this relationship a vertical one), but any colleague, even other managers and executives.

The lack of humanity, of caring and nurturing towards people in the workplace is, in my opinion, a rampant plague that keeps companies in a chronic state of underachievement. Recently, I vowed to devote my career to fighting this problem, and when I joined Marine Press I made it clear: “If I’m to be a manager here, I won’t be telling people what to do. I’ll be taking care of them so that they can do what needs to be done. I’ll actually be working for them, and not the other way around”. Turns out that this is exactly what they wanted and needed.

My colleagues joined me in this mindset, and sentences such as “Take care of your people and they will take care of your business” isn’t a cute quote anymore. It’s a principle we live by.

Principle 2: Trust > Control

We believe in structure, but the minimal necessary amount of structure. We agreed that we don’t have to come up with strict rules and processes for employees to follow. We provide people with business objectives, and they can come up with their own way of reaching them.

The end goal is more important for managers than the path taken to reach it. Once everyone agrees on the goal, the employees have full decision-making power – yes you read that right – to make things happen. “But what if [insert your worry here]?”. Turns out that we simply choose to trust their judgement. If we don’t want to tell people how to work, you can imagine we’re not much interested in telling them what they can’t do as well. The only rule is “Use your judgement, gather feedback from your peers, and if you’re not sure, ask for help”. We’ll figure it out together. And if management is worried about something, we engage in discussion with the teams.

Processes imposed by management can be easily and unscrupulously manipulated. Adhesion to the process becomes the rule, and people have no trust relationship with a process, so they can cheat it without any kind of remorse. It’s much easier than risking to break the trust of your peers.

In our setting, we mainly care for the end result and we trust people to create and improve their own processes to achieve the best results. By being in full control of their processes, the team members won’t (and can’t) hide behind it. I can’t imagine a colleague saying “Well it’s not my fault we’re not delivering, I’m just following the process”. The process is theirs. In these conditions, manipulating or cheating the process becomes nonsense.

To reduce control and accentuate trust, we try to keep everything as simple and flexible as possible. If we need to talk and adjust, then let’s talk and adjust.

Principle 3: Creativity > Tradition

In a recent article that I posted on the Agile Partnership’s blog, I stated that “We’ve always done it like this” was actually a toxic statement, as it’s pretty much the motto of organizations with a fixed mindset.

Things change, needs evolve, contexts fluctuate, and people mature with experience. What once was cannot remain the same for very long. Based on that, we actively try to break old habits and reflexes. We have developed a very interesting mentality between managers: if we all agree quickly on something, it’s probably worth investigating more.

This allows us to be creative where we would normally just do “the usual thing”. Sometimes, we figure out that the “usual thing” makes no sense, is too heavy, too complex, or completely obsolete. I have now learned to grow a little more suspicious of situations where everybody agrees instantaneously. It reminds me that “If everybody thinks like you, you don’t need them”, and it also encourages healthy conflicts to arise rather than artificial harmony.

Becoming a Squad

For those who aren’t used to the concept of squads, know that it was made popular by Spotify and their engineering culture. Squads are basically people from different backgrounds working together to achieve a common goal. Autonomy is the cornerstone of squads; its members have all the necessary power to make things happen.

Forming a squad of managers was not really on purpose at first. There are a few things we wanted to achieve and consolidate, and we eventually figured that we were just creating the ideal context for a squad. Here’s what happened :

We got rid of our job descriptions

We actually got rid of the concept of the job description, but responsibilities, of course, are still important. We knew that some people were responsible for some things, others took care of other things. Historically, that’s how we used to work. The main problem was that if one person is entirely responsible for this one topic, what happens if this person is sick, on leave, on vacation? If others don’t know, whatever needed to happen won’t happen.

So instead, we spent an afternoon in a meeting room, and we listed on the whiteboard everything that needs to happen in our department. From recruiting to personal and professional development, release management and product roadmap. We actually forgot some at first, which proves that when responsibilities are assigned to us, well, selective memory becomes a real danger.

What happened then was quite magical. There were 30+ items on the whiteboard, and we then decided to put our names on the topics that we wanted to champion.

I was very impressed by the results. Not only people put their names on topics that they already knew, liked and mastered, but also on topics they knew nothing about and wanted to learn. Moreover, out of 30+ items, only one was left out (and eventually found a caretaker). Even better, some topics got 2, 3 and 4 names beside them.

The lesson I kept from this is that volunteering is much more powerful than delegation. Now that we do things we chose to do and are curious doing, they do happen and are done better. There is a true sense of ownership, as we’re not doing them just because “it’s in our job description”. We’re happy to deliver because we wanted to do it, and we care.

And to ensure that these things happen outside of a vacuum, the champion’s job is not to do everything by themselves. Their job is to make sure these things happen, and we decided together that whenever someone is to work on one of these items, others had to be invited. We’re only starting, but so far it’s going very well.

We’ve become a support squad

That’s the way we found to ensure that we’re working for our colleagues, and not the other way around. Becoming a squad that’s supporting other squads ensures that we’ll better answer people’s needs.

Just like product squads, we commit to deliver certain things in a fixed amount of time. Our colleagues are our stakeholders, meaning they can refuse what we deliver, or ask us to change it if it doesn’t fulfill their needs. We select what to deliver based on the feedback we get in 1-on-1 discussions, in OfficeVibe, or simply during team workshops and discussions.

We started this a few weeks ago, and we are very positive that people will feel like management is much more active at supporting them and attending to their needs. As we are using OfficeVibe to measure the happiness in our organization, I’m thinking of using this data as a measurement of our squad’s performance.

Now, only time will tell if this approach works for people, but so far, it’s been working wonderfully for me. I feel engaged, empowered, motivated. What I think, what I say and what I do are aligned. Let’s see what happens…

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com