HR Automation Guide to Employee Offboarding

May 23

Introduction

The tech layoffs and resignations are causing business disruptions worldwide. Companies need a formal offboarding process to separate the exiting employees. The offboarding process is crucial for HR to protect data and company assets.

A Forbes study shows that over 50% of employees admitted to leaving the company with critical company data. Employers risk data loss, compliance violations, data, and confidentiality breaches, and ruined reputations without proper offboarding. The offboarding process involves multiple activities. These include revoking access rights, collecting company equipment, transferring job responsibilities, and using exit surveys for feedback.

Ensuring employees leave on a good note is vital to maintain a brand reputation. HR leaders must streamline the offboarding process through employee offboarding automation. This is to prevent risks and enhance the overall employee experience.

Understanding offboarding workflows

The Lever Q1 2023 report shows that 48% of employees are actively looking for new job opportunities. Proper offboarding separates exiting employees gracefully. It eases the transition of job responsibilities to the next employee. HR should play nice with leaving employees. But the essential purpose of offboarding is to protect the company from any legal, economic, and ethical lawsuits due to wrongful termination.

The following triggers initiate the offboarding process:

Voluntary resignation - When an employee wants to leave the organization voluntarily for reasons such as better offers, health issues, personal conflicts, relocation, etc.
Retirement – When an employee reaches the full retirement age and leaves the job permanently.
Furloughs – When HR provides mandatory leave to employees to reduce the number of workers.
Layoffs – When leaders choose to terminate employees permanently due to recession, acquisition, or change in business objectives.
Involuntary termination - When the company dismisses an employee for fraud, poor performance, etc.

Offboarding doesn’t just include an exit interview. It is not meant to convince the employee to continue working. Instead, it is to ensure a smooth and friendly transition. The workflow may vary based on the reason for the employee exiting the company. However, the following processes are essential for offboarding:

Completing paperwork such as severance, health insurance, benefits program, etc.
Creating a knowledge transfer plan.
Shutting down software licenses, user access, and access credentials.
Restricting access to office space.
Retrieving any company equipment.
Contacting all stakeholders.
Updating company payroll.

Offboarding automation benefits

Prioritizing employee experience helps HR to focus on what matters most for the workers. This is especially true during critical moments such as leaving the company, it boosts employee experience. It also protects all types of company assets. Investing time and resources to automate offboarding is important for a company to attract and retain talent.

Offboarding automation will help reduce paperwork and provide valuable data for HR to reduce employee turnover. The software will automatically complete all the crucial steps. It will also ensure compliance with internal and external regulations. It provides a smooth experience for departing employees while properly securing all company assets.

Some of the benefits of employee offboarding automation are:

Reduced risk of data theft and data loss.
Protection of intellectual property.
Assurance that confidential information is inaccessible.
Improved security against privacy breaches of proprietary systems.
A seamless experience for all employees, irrespective of their role or employment tenure.
Improved audit and compliance readiness.
Reduced manual workload to complete the offboarding process.
Enhanced employee satisfaction and experience.
Smooth endpoint reclamation, even for remote employees.

HR leaders can focus more on humanizing the offboarding experience. This ensures that employees are heard while departing. It will uncover workplace issues. This will provide scope for future improvement.

Automation offboarding guide

A security survey showed that 50% of ex-employees can continue to access corporate apps even after leaving the company. When employees have access to sensitive data, they won't hesitate to use it in their new role with a new company. Employee offboarding automation prevents lapses in the manual offboarding process. It ensures policy consistency. It will take care of the following offboarding activities:

Creating a comprehensive employee offboarding checklist.
Ensuring all employee records are in order.
Decommissioning of keys and access cards.
Identification of company properties such as hardware, mobile phones, etc., and ensuring their return.
Ensuring procedure compliance with proper documentation.
Revoking access to local, network, and cloud-based files.
Notifying all stakeholders about departing employees.
Ensuring resources, data, and event logs are kept safe to protect the company against litigation.
Ensuring that employee benefits are not extended beyond the separation date.
Planning for knowledge transfer.
Conducting exit surveys and interviews.
Updating the organizational chart for a seamless flow of communication.

Successful offboarding automation will ensure that when the employees leave the company, it won’t be stressful or uncomfortable for them. Offboarding conversations will help HR to reinforce the employer brand. In the connected world, keeping in touch with leaving employees is crucial to keep the doors open for reconnection.

With the automation software taking care of the workflow, HR leaders can empathize with leaving employees. Recognizing their time and work will provide them with a good experience, even at their last touchpoint with the company. Also, the automation software collects critical employee data. This will provide insight into work experience and employee satisfaction.

Choosing the right employee offboarding automation tool is important to ensure adoption. The software must have an easy-to-use interface. This will bring all offboarding activities under a single platform. It must also integrate with enterprise-wide applications seamlessly to complete the offboarding activities. The software should allow customization of offboarding workflows and manual approval. This will ensure that suitable workflows are triggered as and when needed.

Conclusion

The automation system takes care of the offboarding process. This can avoid financial loss and business disruption. It will ensure that all the documents are in place and all procedures are completed before allowing an employee to leave. The automatic alerts and notifications will ensure that all the departments are notified of departing employees. Offboarding automation will also safely revoke access to company assets. It will guarantee that a departed employee can never access online or offline systems.

Looking for better technology to automate offboarding? Learn how Retriever can help improve and formalize the offboarding process to provide a rewarding employee experience.