Smart organizations know there’s a lot to learn from people who leave. With their shackles broken and the pursuit of other interests ahead, exiting employees have nothing to lose. It’s a great opportunity to get some fresh insights into obvious topics like what made them leave in the first place, what’s going on that might prompt others to leave, and what the departing employee really thinks of the company’s culture, work practices, policies, vision, business direction, and so on.

It’s good to know, for example, if one particular manager or executive is literally driving people out of the company. Or if a specific business practice is chewing up people and spitting them out. Or, in more jargony terms, whether the working environment could use some proactive retooling to help bolster retention levels ; )

Many companies don’t conduct exit interviews (I’ve left one or two where I would have liked an opportunity to provide some, uh, constructive feedback to management), and those who do often consider it an uncomfortable ritual, like changing a dirty diaper, that’s not particularly easy on the exit interviewer’s, or the company’s, self-esteem.

One way around it is the online exit poll, a tactic that I learned about from my old friends Tudor and Ryan Williams, whose company, TWI Surveys, does this kind of thing for its corporate clients. The idea is to institute a mandatory, web-based poll that becomes part of the standardized paperwork that an exiting employee has to complete to fulfil the terms of his or her severance. The poll can ask all the same questions as a real human, but with far less chance of hurt feelings and perhaps even a better chance of full candor. Plus, the results not only generate written comments, but also produce benchmarkable numbers that can pinpoint gaps and indicate trends.

I think this is a great idea, and it’s a tactic that communicators should be recommending to their counterparts in HR and organizational development. Or, if exit interviews or polls are already done, it’s time for communicators to tie in to a practice that could provide a motherlode of information to help inform and shape internal communications planning.

Exit communications. Something to think about, very seriously, in a world where the “war on talent” seems to be intensifying every day and the cost of replacing employees is far higher than the price of keeping them. Finding out why one person leaves might just prevent the next ones from following. It might also help prove our worth as communicators.

Twenty nine of the respondents to a survey in the Nov/Dec issue of CW said that bad news in their companies is delivered by e-mail. That response astonishes me. But if misery loves company, there is some comfort in knowing that the companies where IABC members work are not the only ones who don’t know how to deliver bad news, or so I assume.

IABC sent out press releases on the survey results and generated coverage in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the New Jersey Courier Post, Human Resources Management, The Charlotte Observer, the San Francisco Examiner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Boston Herald. When I talked to my networking group (12 heads of small businesses who are not communicators)about the press coverage this survey had received, they all asked to get a copy of the CW article. My conclusion is that there is so much interest in delivering bad news because doing it right remains a mystery to many people.

It seems to me that it is just common sense that when you have to deliver news about job cuts, benefit reductions, sale of a company or any other kind of bad news, that basic courtesy would require doing so face to face, not through e-mail.

Do people use e-mail because they are more concerned about efficiency than showing respect for their employees? Or are they just cowards?

I am interested in hearing from other communicators about how bad news is delivered in your organizations. Have you ever been asked by your leadership to deliver bad news via e-mail? What was the outcome?

Anytime I see an item of clothing for sale that says “one size fits all,” I run in the opposite direction. It can be a t-shirt or a baseball cap with a Velcro closure, but rarely have I found that one size really does fit all.

The same is true with employee communications. Employees come in all sizes, shapes, colors. We say, as organizations, that we treasure the diversity. Yet our communication budgets are most often so meager that we can barely afford to cover the one-size-fits-all communication programs, let alone think of doing multiple sizes or iterations or tailored content. Those big monies are usually available only on the customer side of the house. For example, British retail giant Tesco (think Costco or WalMart if you’re in North America) sends a quarterly mailing to 11 million customers … in five million versions! It’s tailored to the members buying habits. And yet we struggle to get out one version of a quarterly newsletter to a few thousand employees. What’s wrong with this picture?

Technology is helping us. Portal products can recognize the reader and allow customization of content. RSS feeds and subscription efforts like podcasting give employees a chance to select what they see and hear. Blogging means that others beyond corporate communications are helping generate content.

Yet most of the information we push into the communications system is generated and “controlled” by someone in corporate communications or IT or HR or some part of the organization. How far away are we from the day when internal communications becomes the candid and freewheeling conversation that’s described in The Cluetrain Manifesto? When will the communication be as candid as what’s discussed around the water cooler? Are you there yet? I’d love to hear what hills you’ve conquered in moving away from one size fits all.