3d • General discussion
🪦 The Post-Mortem Paradox: Why Exit Interviews Are a Dead System
By the time a VA or remote employee hands you their resignation, they've already checked out. They've got another job lined up. Their loyalty walked out the door weeks ago.
If you're relying on exit interviews to find out why your team is leaving, you're running a post-mortem on a system that's already dead.
Exit interviews don't work. Departing employees have nothing to gain and a reference to protect, so they give you the safe answer. Somewhere around 80 to 90% of people walking out the door write down something like "better opportunity" or "higher pay," whether that's the real reason or not.
That creates a blind spot. Managers hear "more money" in almost every exit conversation and walk away thinking that's the whole story. Something like 89% of turnover gets chalked up to pay. But research on 20,000 workers found the real number flipped: 88% leave because of push factors. Bad management. Unrealistic workloads. No coaching. A culture people don't want to be part of. Chase the wrong problem long enough and you end up in a wage war, throwing retention bonuses around, and the actual issue never gets touched.
This gets worse with offshore talent, especially in hierarchical, respect-driven cultures like the Philippines. Filipino VAs are not going to sit you down and tell you your process is broken or that you're a bad manager. Out of respect, they'll quietly disconnect instead. Then one day they resign with a polite, convenient story, usually a "family emergency," rather than tell you what actually happened.
The fix is to stop doing damage control after the fact. Run Stay Interviews instead.
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🪦 The Post-Mortem Paradox: Why Exit Interviews Are a Dead System
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