A wave of resignations: from hypotheses to causes
Every exit interview says something different. How to read where departures concentrate, question the people who stay, and reach a cause you can decide on.
8 min readUpdated August 21, 2026
When people keep leaving, everyone has an explanation and nobody has evidence: pay, a manager, the market, the workload. Yet a wave of resignations is analysed like any other signal — by first looking at who leaves, then asking the people who stay.
Why exit interviews are not enough
They come too late, in a conversation where the person has nothing left to gain from being precise and a lot to lose from being harsh. The most common answer — an opportunity, a project, a salary — is true and explains nothing: it says why this person left now, not why leaving had become conceivable.
They also do not compare. Run by different people, with different questions, they produce accounts rather than data — which is exactly what you are seeing when they all say something different.
Keep them: an honest exit interview is still the best source on one precise mechanism. Just do not ask them to settle between your hypotheses.
Start by looking at who leaves
Before questioning anyone, describe the departures with what you already have: team, role, site, tenure, management line, type of exit. The question is not the overall rate, it is the concentration.
Departures spread evenly and departures concentrated on one role, one site or one tenure band are two different problems. The first points to general conditions — pay, market, workload; the second to something local, and therefore fixable.
Two cautions. On small headcounts, a two-person difference means nothing: look across several quarters before concluding. And cross-reading by manager is legitimate to target the enquiry, never to establish responsibility — it says where to look for the mechanism, not who is at fault.
Question the people who stay
This is the useful source, and the one that gets skipped. The people who have not yet decided to leave are the only ones who can say what makes leaving conceivable — and they are still there for you to act.
Four subjects are enough to locate the issue: workload and whether it is sustainable, how legible the next step is — progression, mobility —, the quality of the relationship with the direct manager, and the intent to stay over a stated horizon. The first three usually explain the fourth.
Intent to stay is a sensitive question. Ask it only if anonymity is real and the attachment is collective: you will know a team is at risk, not who said so. Set a response threshold below which no team result is displayed, and announce it before the questions go out.
From signal to cause
At this stage you have zones, not causes. Interviews targeted on those zones serve to reconstruct chains: what changed, when, what the person tried, and what happened next.
A usable cause has three properties. It explains the concentration you observed. It is consistent across several independent accounts. And someone in the organization has the power to act on it: a cause that is true but out of reach — the labour market — is not a finding, it is context.
Finally, cross the people who stayed with the people who left. When both sources point at the same mechanism, you can decide. When they diverge, it often means leaving and being unhappy do not have the same cause — and each deserves its own answer.
What to say, and when
Asking about departures creates an immediate expectation: the question itself announces that the subject is acknowledged. Announce the date of the report back before the first question, and hold it.
Report what you found, and say what you will not address. A consultation that implicitly promises to fix everything produces a second wave of departures: the people who still had hope.
Then re-measure. Intent to stay, asked twice a few months apart on the same scope, is the best leading indicator you have. The departure rate can only be read after the fact.
Key points
- Exit interviews tell you about cases; they do not settle between your hypotheses.
- Look at where departures concentrate — team, role, site, tenure — before questioning anyone.
- The people who stay are the useful source: workload, prospects, management, intent to stay.
- A usable cause explains the concentration, holds across several accounts, and someone can act on it.
These steps are tooled in Syntonie
Questionnaires, transcribed interviews, analysis by team and by role: the platform runs a firm's method on your organization, described once.