If your company conducts exit interviews, much data is collected but little is being done with it to improve overall management performance, according to Dick Finnegan, founder of the Retention Institute.

In an article for Recruiting Trends, Finnegan says that the main difficulty with exit interviews is that “employees often times don’t tell you why they are leaving.” To really find out why employees are leaving, he says that managers should interview their subordinate supervisors every time that supervisor loses an employee, with key questions such as Why did this employee leave? What could you have done differently? Who trained this employee? How was this employee’s performance? Did you have any reason to suspect this employee would leave? How did this employee work with her colleagues? “Supervisors suddenly develop better retention skills when they know retention is important in the eyes of the boss,” Finnegan notes.