Onboarding is a concept that gets a fair amount of attention, but offboarding less so.
Many organizations are focusing on creating automated onboarding processes that work for onsite and remote employees. Cybersecurity, password management, productivity, and corporate culture are some of the large priorities of onboarding.
Offboarding should be getting the same level of attention, however.
Below we go into everything you should know about offboarding and its relevance to any organization.
Table of Contents
What is Offboarding?
Offboarding is a term that refers to the formal moves required to separate an employee from a company. Offboarding might follow a resignation or termination as well as retirement.
Offboarding can cover everything that happens from the point an employee decides to leave a company or the employer decides to separate.
For example, offboarding includes taking access rights and deactivating passwords, transferring the responsibilities of the employee, and doing exit interviews.
The overarching goal of offboarding is to tie up any loose ends when someone leaves the business for any reason. You also want to be able to learn from each offboarding that you do, so you can make the future experience better for your current employees and new hires.
There are so many ways offboarding is important.
For example, your employer brand is built on what employees, including former employees, say about your organization.
A lot of companies are having a tough time finding employees right now, so if you have a lot of disgruntled former employees, you won’t have a competitive employer brand.
When you have a good offboarding program, not only can you learn how to be a better employer, but you can take some steps to avoid unhappy employees. A lot of what you learn during offboarding is going to be directly applied to your employer brand.
It’s also possible that with successful offboarding, you end up with a boomerang employee.
A boomerang employee is one who comes back and who you rehire.
When your current employees see how you handle the offboarding process, they’re also going to feel more confident in you as their employer.
When employees feel like things are being done secretly or there’s the feeling that they could get fired at any time, it makes them less productive and less likely to hang around. With an organized and productive offboarding process, your employees will see that you respect them from start to finish.
Beyond those basics, the following are tips and things to keep in mind to implement offboarding.
Technical Offboarding
You have to remove an employee digitally from your organization for the sake of cybersecurity. That means you’re taking them out of things like your HR software, and you also need to have an automated process to remove all their privileges and access to any systems.
In order to successfully implement this, you need to know exactly what they have access to, which is why you should make it a priority to keep an inventory of all system and app privileges throughout your organization.
You need to be aware of the cybersecurity data and risks that come with employees leaving. This doesn’t even have to be purposeful on the exiting employee’s part.
It could be that if you leave information floating around, it gets lost or stolen.
You really need to always focus on limiting account privileges as much as you can and especially when an employee is no longer working for you.
Specific Tips for Technical Offboarding Include:
- Keep specific IT inventories, as was touched on above. You need to know about not just passwords and digital assets but devices and physical assets as well.
- Let your IT team know what’s going on and keep them in the loop any time an employee leaves. Then, they can keep an eye on any unusual activity.
- You should talk to your IT team in advance of termination if that’s what’s going to happen so they can start looking at the employees’ computer and data use ahead of time.
Offboarding Steps
When an employee is leaving, you should first thank them for what they brought to the company.
Then, once you’ve gathered all the details, you should be open in your communication about what’s going on.
Honesty and transparency are so important to provide reassurance and create trust with other employees.
The next step should be a knowledge transfer, which is talked about more below, and then comes the recovery of business assets.
After you have the assets, revoke access to systems, and finally, hold an exit interview.
Then, you can begin to update your internal charts, and of course, you need to make sure to take the exiting employee off your payroll.
What Is Knowledge Transfer?
The step above, knowledge transfer, is an important part of offboarding.
You will need to understand their daily routine and the tasks that they are responsible for that are priorities. You also need to know what systems and files they use and who they work with internally and externally.
You may need to determine if there’s any training they may need to provide to another employee.
You could, if you don’t have the chance for that, ask them to create a video or a document detailing this information if someone is going to hopefully fill the position they’re leaving.
At this point, it’s a good time to assess the tasks that the employee was doing. Audit to figure out whether or not you could potentially automate some parts of their job or distribute their tasks in a different, more efficient way.
You might find creative ways to save resources, including time and money through your onboarding process when an employee leaves.
Finally, during the exit interview, focus on finding out information that will be of value to the organization.
You want to gather feedback and use it seriously.
Learn what your company could improve upon and the biggest challenges the leaving employee faced.
Ask more about the relationships the employee had within the business and if there’s something you could have done to get that person to stay if they weren’t terminated.
