Exit Interviews Enhanced
Modern oral debriefing is an enhancement of the old-fashioned prescriptive and formulaic exit interview, which is typically not an interview at all, rather the output of a formulaic questionnaire that attempts to uncover why employees – usually lower hierarchy workers - leave. The oral debrief has been sophisticated to the extent that its output is now a powerful means of extracting from individuals valuable knowledge that can be used to improve on past performance.
The most accomplished practitioners are the US military, which has developed vast archives of oral testimony of wars since WW2 specifically as an educational tool for successive generations. The Department of the Army, for example, calls the process the End of Tour (EoT) interviews, which are conducted with departing commanders to make interviews available to their incoming replacements so that individuals can better understand the issues faced by their predecessors. Equally, companies such as Ford, ARCO, Beckman Instruments, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilley, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, Rohm and Haas and Standard Oil Company have also initiated programs of oral history but their application in decision-making is tentative.
The oral debriefing usually centres on the issues and decisions unique to the organization and can be especially instructive as a decision-making tool. With senior decision-makers the most common candidates, such debriefings are always conducted near the end of a person’s tenure, although some practitioners are now using it on a more regular basis and in project management.
Whilst the co-operation of interviewees is essential, the quality of recall is often dependent on the skill of the interviewer, who needs to be commanding enough not to be intimidated by the interviewee and insightful enough to identify and pursue pertinent questions. The actual skill of oral debriefing is the art of asking relevant questions and when the answers are unclear or fudged, the asking of even more probing questions.
In the world of evidential gathering where rigorous substantiation is a pre-requisite for all experiential learning, the oral route is often more valuable than anything extracted from written sources. The reason is that managers are generally better speakers than they are writers. Also, their spoken word is invariably a more efficient way of conveying the abstract and complex nature of elements like the nuances of corporate culture, management style and the often-obscure issues surrounding decision-making within groups. Importantly, it can be effective at capturing the tacit ‘humanware’ elements of organizational memory.
Read more about this topic: Oral Debriefing, History
Famous quotes containing the words exit, interviews and/or enhanced:
“There is no exit from the circle of one’s beliefs.”
—Keith Lehrer (b. 1936)
“What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,—equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)