Offboarding: best practice for a smooth employee exit

Welcoming members of staff to their new role, known as onboarding, is an exciting and special time for most companies. There’s a particular process to go through to ensure that new employees are made to feel welcome and to acclimatise them to their job and the team they’ll be working with, setting them up for success right from the start.

However, often the same amount of time and effort doesn’t go into offboarding; that time when employees are leaving, whatever the circumstances. So, to make this a better process, in this article, we’ll cover how a carefully considered offboarding process can benefit both the departing worker and the company.

To clear this up from the start, offboarding is the process by which the HR department handles departing employees. It’s the last stage of the employment lifecycle and, if done correctly, can result in a smooth transition for both the firm and the exiting professional.

Offboarding mitigates legal challenges and security threats, helping firms retain their talent, attract new talent, and enhance engagement. Below are the benefits to your employees, as well as to your organisation.

• Achieves an amicable separation between the two parties
• Realises an opportunity to share honest opinions without any fear of the consequences
• Offers a clear understanding of what the final payout will be and how any owed benefits will work
• Gives an opportunity to ask any lingering questions
• Promises a chance to announce their departure on their terms (if it’s a redundancy)
• Gives them a chance to say a proper goodbye to colleagues

• Reduces risk of any security breaches
• Minimises the chance of departing employees suing the company
• Reduces risk of the departing employee bad-mouthing the company
• Decreases disruption to the existing team and overall operation
• Achieves higher morale amongst remaining members of staff
• Promises a smoother transition to the employee’s replacement
• Gains invaluable insights from the exiting team member
• Secures a friendly separation between the two parties
• Opens potential employee referrals from the exiting worker
• Increases the chance of the employee who’s leaving returning in the future

The offboarding programme should include the following:

There’s a lot to discover about your company’s procedures once you’ve been through the offboarding process. This is particularly valid if the employee who’s leaving brought about the termination of employment in the first place. It could be that there’s an issue within the company that you don’t know about. That means you must try to understand the steps that led to their decision, as this will help you to review and overhaul your strategies and adjust any that need it to improve your employee retention. 

Having this formal offboarding process will make it much easier to retrieve valuable insight from departing employees. By including a “termination of employment” survey and an exit interview as part of the offboarding process, you’ll be able to reach valid conclusions about employee attrition. These two add-ons – the exit interview and survey – prove to be very useful in gaining insight by:

• Highlighting problem areas
• Boosting retention rates
• Establishing viable reasons for the termination of employment
• Improving the work culture
• Pinpointing development opportunities
• Ensuring compliance
• Balancing turnover costs

Expert Tip:
Compile all the exit interview data you’ve collated in one place and then review trends with senior leadership on a regular basis.

There’s no doubt about it that leaving a job can be stressful… even if it was at the member of staff’s instigation. You, as the company, can make it easier for them by being supportive and open. You can do this by spelling out when they will get their last payment of wages and when their benefits coverage will end. Let them announce their departure. That way, they can release the information to stop unfounded rumours from flying about, potentially upsetting remaining members of staff.

If the exiting employee has been made redundant, it’s worth considering providing outplacement services. The best ones offer expert career coaching, help with CVs, networking opportunities, and so much more. Check out the costs and make sure that whichever outplacement provider you choose has high landing rates, meaning your former staff member will be able to find a job faster and more easily than they would without outplacement help.

Expert tip:
Aim to hire the departing employee’s replacement before they leave, so they can engage in person-to-person knowledge transfer.

An employee’s departure can be highly disruptive to the team and the company as a whole. Remaining members of staff might have to pick up the slack on projects they possibly haven’t been involved in before. Because of this, the pace of work might slow, leading to a decrease in productivity and revenue. Additionally, those employees who are staying might be annoyed at the extra work, with accompanying stress and confusion.

An offboarding programme can nip all of this in the bud. Before the staff member leaves, ask them to detail everything that they do in a day, including one-off, ongoing projects. This then gives those employees taking on the tasks points of reference, and means the replacement hire will be able to get up to speed more quickly. 

Offboarding best practice extends to ensuring that confidential and classified information stays within the company and that all security protocols remain in check. An inept offboarding strategy could pose a serious security risk to your organisation, particularly if sensitive information is involved. Just imagine what could happen if a former employee leaked classified data. It would be so damaging.

You need to ask yourself if you can trust the exiting employee not to misuse their position once they’ve left. Even if trust levels are high, it’s better to be safe rather than sorry. Following the IT security and compliance policy during the offboarding process will go a long way to achieving this. Take these essential steps to establish security and compliance during the employee offboarding process:

• Keep a distribution list for employee turnover – Let all major departments in your organisation know about any employee turnover, so department managers can plan how to deal with departing employees while ensuring compliance.
• Forward emails and phone calls – Channel all emails and calls to other relevant team members until the exiting employee’s account is deleted. It’s customary to wait a set amount of time before permanently deleting accounts, because a particular employee may have been the main contact for important clients or partners.
• Disable log-ins to the exiting employee’s accounts – Once the set amount of time has passed, close all accounts associated with the exiting employee, both on the premises and in the cloud. This is imperative to ensure security and compliance during offboarding.
• Review any contacts of the exiting employee – See if the exiting employee is listed as the primary contact for a project or an account. Just because they’ve left doesn’t mean the project is dead in the water, so reassign all tasks accordingly.

Offboarding checklists are designed to simplify and track IT security and compliance during staff turnovers, ensuring that the process is error-free and foolproof. Below are suggestions for what to include in an offboarding checklist, to secure a seamless transition.

• Efficient and transparent communication – Notify relevant departments, such as HR, finance, and IT, about the exit, informing them of the reason why, if needs be.
• Comprehensive paperwork – Ensure exiting employees sign all pertinent documents that relate to their termination of employment.
• Launch knowledge transfer – Seek out a suitable replacement to take over the duties of the departing employee by preparing files, documentation, and lists of information for transfer, while outlining the deadlines for submitting all final tasks.
• Conduct an exit interview – Ask the outgoing employee for honest feedback about their time with your company, then share these findings with department managers. Follow up any complaints that may set off future employee terminations.
• Recover company assets – Send a letter detailing all company-owned equipment and assets that need to be returned. These usually include phones, laptops, keys, security cards, and uniforms.
• Tie up any loose ends – There’s no harm in double-checking to see if the offboarding process has run as smoothly as possible. Steer the exiting employee away from any upcoming meetings, inform other employees, and ensure they clear their desk.

Despite this all being about the end of a job for someone, the offboarding process can be a very positive experience. It should have the same effort put into it as onboarding.

Throwing a leaving do for the employee, where you acknowledge their achievements and contributions and talk positively about their time with you, can go a long way to avoiding leaving a nasty taste in the mouth of the departing employee. This builds bridges and sets the tone for the future, both for your company and for the departing employee.

You never know… that same employee might be back again further down the line, more prepared and bringing a set of skills that you desire. It’s known as the employee boomerang effect. A recent survey revealed that“56% of UK employees would return to their former employer, cementing the trend of ‘boomerang’ behaviour in the market.” That’s why it is so important to treat departing professionals with respect. Those who experience a seamless offboarding process could be the key to improving future employee retention rates and the company reputation.

The time taken for offboarding will vary from employee to employee. While they’ll all go through similar stages, it will often depend on the seniority of the employee leaving. There will be more to do and discuss for a senior manager than for an entry-level worker, for example. Plus, the leadership team is more likely to require a longer notice period for executives, as it normally takes longer to recruit a replacement and conduct knowledge transfer at that level.

1. The employee offboarding process is just as critical as employee onboarding.

2. Offboarding protects your organisation from any security or legal threats, whilst also minimising disruption to the team and productivity losses.

3. An effective offboarding process facilitates a smooth transition for your company as well as for the departing employee.

4. Including outplacement services in the offboarding process is a great way to show the employee you care about them, while simultaneously boosting staff morale.

5. An offboarding checklist will keep you organised, ensuring you cover all the necessary stages.

If your organisation is considering outplacement services, contact us at the earliest opportunity to find out more.

Elizabeth Openshaw

Elizabeth Openshaw has over 12 years of experience in the job search sector, including extensive expertise in outplacement and CV reviews. Previously a Journalist on national publications, she is Director of her own company, OpenDoor CV Expertise Ltd. You can connect with her at Elizabeth Openshaw | LinkedIn.