Is an offboarding process really necessary?

What is offboarding?

When recruiting a new employee, there are three major stages in the process:

• Their arrival in the company, which generally triggers an onboarding process,
• His or her development within the company (change of managerial position, responsibilities, etc.),
• His departure, at which point another process is put in place, namely offboarding.

Whatever the reason for leaving, whether it's the employee or the employer, it's important not to neglect this departure, both for the employer's brand image and for safety reasons.

Why is an offboarding process important?

Onboarding well managed, offboarding aside

Everyone's thinking about how to improve the way an employee is welcomed into a company. HR wants them to feel welcome, and managers want them to be up and running quickly. The onboarding process is therefore often thought through and implemented through concrete actions.

On the other hand, when an employee leaves the company, HR is generally content with the administrative side of things (pay, etc.), the manager is focused on replacing the departing person, and the offboarding process is left a little to one side.

However, it is vital to support employees who leave the company, whether through redundancy or of their own free will.

It's not sexy, there's no point in spending time with an employee who's about to leave, and HR and sometimes managers neglect this departure.
Everyone might say to themselves, yes, but there's nothing really at stake when an employee leaves, it's not like when he or she arrives, nothing is expected of him or her!

The challenges of offboarding

The departure of an employee must be taken seriously for 3 reasons:

• the employee will probably stay in the same field and spread an image of the company he or she has left to new colleagues, customers, network...
• social networks and other review sites are the first thing an employee will think of if he or she is unhappy with his or her former company and the departure has not gone satisfactorily. This could trigger the 'little extra' that will move the employee to action over a bad review.
• It's becoming increasingly common for employees to return to work for their former company. They come back with more skills and knowledge of the company, which makes them a valuable asset. So it's crucial to leave a good impression on the departing employee.

The offboarding process, what to do?

Here are some important points to bear in mind when offboarding one of your employees:

Human side

• Announcing the departure to the team: we all know how powerful rumors can be! That's why it's so important not to let the direct team know last 😉 This is also the time to organize a farewell party.

• Transferring knowledge: it's important to hand over knowledge to the team and/or the new employee. This is the time when the new member of staff explains his or her procedures, current missions, etc.

• Organize a final interview: this is the time to take stock of the employee's progress with the company. It's also a time when the employee feels freest to talk, so you can get more candid information about the positive and negative points he or she has experienced in the company. It's really a time to get quality feedback (if, of course, you're mature enough to receive it, and don't get defensive!).

• Stay in touch: don't close doors, either within the company or for future collaboration elsewhere. Who hasn't bumped into an old colleague in a totally different context? We don't know the future, so we pay attention to good relationships 😉. If relations are good, it might be a good idea to offer a meal a few months after the employee's departure to catch up on new ones. And don't forget LinkedIn, the network for keeping in touch with people on a professional level.

• Dealing with the paperwork: it's all part and parcel of leaving, but you may still have to ask for administrative papers. Beware: the law is strict when it comes to departure.

85% of those questioned would be ready to speak positively about this company to those around them if their departure went well.

Hays survey 12/2019

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The technical side

• Closing or suspending accounts: it's important to remove network, software and physical access to the company, so that users who are no longer with the company are no longer part of the workforce, but are no longer part of the IS perimeter. In many companies (including large groups), many employees who have been away for several months still have their accesses open, which can generate major security problems. On the other hand, the correct deactivation of a departed user's accounts can result in significant savings: licenses can be reallocated to new users.
• Transfer user rights: pay particular attention to employees with administrator rights to powerful tools. A sales rep, for example, who still has access to the company's CRM (Salesforce, CRM Dynamics, etc.), has all the information he needs to solicit his former customer on behalf of his new employer.
• Ask for the return of equipment: your employee will inevitably have had badges, access keys and perhaps computer equipment. For obvious reasons of security and cost, it's essential to make a note of loans in advance, and to ask for the equipment to be returned on the day of departure.

Is it possible to automate offboarding?

Nobody's asking you to have a memory like an elephant! Fortunately, it's possible to mix human and computer in these processes.
There are many offboarding solutions. You may find some that manage just that, you may also find some that manage onboarding and offboarding, or others that are more security-oriented.

We offer a solution that will help you not only with offboarding, but also with IS security in general.

In this way, you can create checklists for the 'people' part of the business, which you can use within HR and send to the relevant managers.

For the 'technical' part, all you need to do is automate your actions using workflows. By linking your HRIS and Active Directory or similar to your solution, you can automatically :

• Disable/suspend accounts: when an employee leaves, you can suspend his or her software resources.
• Notification of departures: managers, HR and IT departments are notified before an employee leaves, so that they can prepare their departure in the best possible way.
• Keep an eye on your stock: as you've filled in everything you've loaned to the employee, it's very easy on the day they leave to find out what resources they have and ask for them back. This will enable you to manage your stock of equipment properly and avoid multiple Excel files!