When someone leaves your organization, you need an offboarding process that brings the relationship to a formal conclusion and gives both parties an opportunity to settle accounts. Unfortunately, some companies don’t see the value of offboarding. They just go their separate ways. That’s a mistake that prevents them from collecting valuable information and maintaining their reputation.
Make sure your employee offboarding process goes smoothly by adding these five best practices.
Start Training a Replacement Before Your Employee Leaves
Ideally, you should know at least two weeks ahead of time that an employee plans to leave your organization. That’s not a lot of time, but it does give you a chance to start looking for and training a replacement.
Recruiting and training can take a lot of effort and money. Most SMBs find that it makes more sense for them to outsource those tasks to an HR consultant.
Contact America’s Back Office to learn more about the benefits of outsourcing your HR needs to a professional employer organization (PEO).
Coordinate with Other Departments Affected by the Departure
One employee’s departure can affect many people in your organization. That person probably filled an essential role that a lot of employees and managers relied on. Suddenly, people don’t know who to contact when they need to assign a task, generate a report, or retrieve data. You also need to make sure everyone involved in payroll and scheduling knows when the employee plans to leave.
Hopefully, you never have to experience any drama when an employee moves on to another job. It’s better to prepare for the unexpected than to find yourself facing a tense situation. Inform your security team about the day’s offboarding so they know to pay attention to anything out of the ordinary.
Obviously, you have a lot of people to coordinate with during the employee offboarding process. Make it as smooth as possible by outsourcing your HR needs to consultants who have seen it all.
Perform an Exit Interview
An exit interview gives you a chance to receive unfiltered thoughts from an outgoing employee. Use it as a chance to find ways that you can improve your organization.
Questions that you should ask include:
- Why did you start looking for a different job?
- What attracted you to the new job you’re taking?
- Would you consider taking another position here in the future?
- What could we have done better?
- Did you feel comfortable talking to your manager and colleagues?
- Could you describe our company culture?
- What were the best and worst parts of your job here?
Most companies that adopted remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic say that they plan to continue using it to some extent. Remote work can make exit interviews difficult. Don’t let your in-house HR team conduct the interview if they don’t have the right tools and training to do it well.
Avoid the difficulty of adding the best practices for offboarding by outsourcing your HR needs to America’s Back Office.
Collect Assets Owned by the Business
You don’t want your former employee to walk out of the building with assets owned by the business. Make sure you collect everything, including:
- Electronics.
- Key cards.
- Keys.
- External hard drives.
- ID cards.
It probably sounds obvious that you should collect expensive items like mobile devices and hard drives. Something as simple as a cheap key card or ID could create problems down the road, though. What if the person’s manager or a member of your security team forgets to remove the former employee’s key card code from the system? Now, someone in the world has access to your building. A disgruntled employee could use it to cause trouble, or someone could steal it from your ex-employee to enter your building without triggering alarms.
An ID card can cause similar problems. Depending on the size of your staff, anyone could use a company ID card to get through security at a busy time of the day.
Don’t let your business become an easy target. Collect everything you own to decrease risk.
Revoke Access to All Accounts
Departing employees pose a significant threat to your data and network security. Once you know that someone plans to leave your organization, pay careful attention to their accounts to notice any behavior that seems out of the ordinary. You don’t want to assume that someone will steal your data, but you don’t want to take a chance, either.
Revoking access to all accounts needs to become a part of your employee offboarding process. As soon as the person doesn’t need access to an account, remove their privileges. Don’t assume that some access points don’t matter. An experienced hacker could get into your network through practically any point, including a chat application or a time tracker.
Threats against cybersecurity have become more sinister since the rise of BYOD policies. Your employee might have login information stored on their personal device. Restricting access from every location is the only way to protect your network.
How America’s Back Office Can Help
It takes a lot of planning and effort to make a smooth employee offboarding process that gives your business useful information and ends relationships on a good note. You don’t have to spend time developing a process and offboarding employees. Schedule a consultation with America’s Back Office to get assistance from HR professionals who can handle the task for you.
