When someone is leaving your company, whether it is voluntarily or involuntarily, you will want to make the transition process as seamless as possible. Creating and carefully implementing an employee offboarding process helps companies stay ahead of difficult situations, to maintain a good reputation, and to provide a memorable and positive farewell to their employees.
Offboarding can be defined as the process that leads to the formal separation between an employee and a company. This can be a voluntary process (resignation, retirement) or an involuntary process (termination). But whether it’s one or the other, transitioning employees out of an organization should be a coordinated and standardized process because it entails several processes and tasks that need to be followed in a specific order.
Employee offboarding means you’ll need to be transferring several job responsibilities to someone else, which is why it’s highly important for the process to be as effective, organized, and methodized as possible. Also, when someone is leaving an organization or transiting from one job to another, there are usually several departments or people that will need to be involved in the process to ensure all protocols and arrangements are being followed and fulfilled.
Why is Offboarding So Important for Companies?
Employee offboarding should a professional, structured process. You will want to stay ahead in a competitive environment and you will also want to make sure that your transitioning employee feels like he is navigating a carefully planned-out process, one that leaves your company’s reputation intact. So what are the reasons offboarding is so relevant?
The fact that your employees leave with a positive feeling can speak highly of your company’s values. A successful onboarding process can also lead to brand ambassadors, and this can only be accomplished through a good lasting impression of you and your company, one that a transitioning employee could later share on their personal and professional networks.
A well-structured offboarding process can help to enrich an employee’s experience by providing a professional assessment of every responsibility handled by that employee, which can serve as an opportunity to provide feedback as well as to highlight achievements during their time and career.
It’s the perfect time to receive useful information about your company, which you can then use to better your processes. Performing exit interviews can be an excellent way to gain insight into your company and the people who work in it. This is the type of information that, by analyzing it, can help you to reduce employee turnover.
Employee Offboarding Best Practices
Let’s dive into some of the best employee offboarding practices that companies can incorporate into their management process:
Make a list. Employee offboarding should be a consistent process, one that can be revisited. Making a list with all the necessary steps can make this process a lot easier.
Retrieve valuable insights. Companies should document the reasons behind their employee’s exit. People are more open to discussing details about the organization once they know they no longer depend on it. Exit interviews should always be conducted during the offboarding process in order to gather important information about culture, processes, ethics, and group morale. HR can later document and use this valuable information to determine trends and provide feedback to the organization over time.
Review benefits, nondisclosure, and severance packages. Intellectual property and nondisclosure agreements should be discussed before the employee exiting your company. The same applies to finances, health insurance, and severance packages. Make sure your employees know and understand the terms under which they’re leaving.
Review inventory items. There are usually several things and objects that would be issued to the employee during their time at the company. ID badges, keys, keycards, mobile devices, laptops, software, parking passes, and the list could go on. Account for all these items before their departure.
Prevent your productivity from dropping. It’s important that knowledge gets effectively transferred to someone else. When an employee leaves, their activities will be interrupted, but this should not translate to a drop in your productivity. By ensuring your employee understands the importance of transferring the information about which systems they use, contacts, documentation, passwords, specific responsibilities, and ownership of resources, you can make sure the next person will be able to effectively perform their job.
Streamline Your Employee Offboarding Process with Instagantt
Offboarding is not just a matter of recordkeeping, it can also have significant consequences to your company. From preventing security gaps or liabilities to providing a memorable farewell to your employees and promoting the “alumni effect”, a well-planned offboarding process can help managers stay on top of all exits.
Regardless of the size of your company, or how much time the employee played a part in it, offboarding is a critical process that can take days to complete. And because this process includes many different steps, it can be difficult to remember each one or to rely on a simple checklist to make sure each step is completed. After all, overlooking a single step could potentially translate to security and financial risks for your company. When it comes to preventing mistakes and staying on track of chronological tasks, Instaganttis the go-to solution.
Instagantt is a Gantt chart software that can help you create efficient workflows for your offboarding process. You can create multiple processes for each type of scenario in a way that it perfectly fits your company’s need. But the most important thing is that you won’t ever miss a step because this tool was made for managing projects and schedules, and you can easily keep track and update your different tasks.
Additionally, you will be able to export and share your checklists with HR members, managers, team members, and stakeholders alike, helping you make sure everyone stays in the loop.
