Employee offboarding
Considering the average tenure for workers in the US is 4.1 years, it’s no longer realistic to expect employees to stay with your company forever. This means that offboarding needs to be a critical part of the employee lifecycle rather than just an ad hoc process or afterthought.
Offboarding is the process of ending the working relationship between a business and its employee. And just like many other parts of the employee experience, logistics are just one small piece of the puzzle. Instead of viewing offboarding as a transaction, take this opportunity to get feedback and build a relationship with the employee who is leaving—when it makes sense to do so.
There are several different circumstances when you need to offboard employees, and these distinctions are important:
- Voluntary resignations when an employee chooses to leave to take a job at another company, return to school, take care of a family member, retire, or for other personal reasons
- Involuntary terminations are when the company initiates the end of the working relationship. These tend to fall into two sub-categories: Separations initiated by the company due to an employee’s performance or conduct OR Reduction in Forces/layoffs/furloughs where the company initiates the separation due to financial difficulty or business restructuring
The importance of a good offboarding process
Being thoughtful about your offboarding process has a number of benefits.
1. Maintain security and business continuity
This is likely what most people think of when it comes to offboarding—from a legal, IT, and facilities perspective, you want to ensure that you collect any company property like computers, phones, and keycards or badges and remove access to company email, intranet, and other digital assets. Having a structured offboarding process will help you tie up any loose ends and prevent departing employees from having access to sensitive information about your company and clients.
2. End the employee experience on a high note
The “peak–end rule,” popularized by behavioral scientist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman finds that people judge an experience largely by two data points: how they felt at its peak (when it was most intense) and how they felt at the end. Taking extra care during the offboarding process (especially in the case of voluntary departures) ensures that employees end on a high note with a good impression of your company, making them more likely to write positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor and contribute to your employer brand.
3. Open the door to an ongoing relationship
When you treat employees with respect during offboarding, they’re much more likely to consider returning in the future. The concept of boomerang employees (those who leave a company and return to it in the future) has gained traction in recent years. According to LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Report, 4.3% of hires in 2021 were boomerang employees. Even if your alumni never rejoin your company full-time, they could very well come on as freelancers or consultants, refer friends or members of their network to your open roles, become your customers, speak at your events, etc.
Employee offboarding checklist for voluntary departures
When dealing with a voluntary departure, you will often have more time to prepare and communicate the news, but that’s not always the case. You may find it valuable to come up with both a standard timeline (two weeks or more) and a shortened timeline version (for same day departures). It’s always a good idea to check with your legal team to make sure you’re following local and national employment laws. Here are a few of the key activities to include in your offboarding checklist.
Collect a written notice of resignation
This is generally recommended as a legal precaution so you have proof the departure was voluntary.
Inform key stakeholders
These stakeholders can vary, depending on your organization, but will often include payroll, benefits, and IT so they can arrange final paychecks, terminate benefits, and ensure devices are returned and access to company email and software is removed.
Take care of necessary paperwork
In addition to the written resignation, you may want to have the employee sign a non-disclosure or non-compete agreement or other legal paperwork. Check with your legal team to find out what’s required! This can also be a good time to collect the employee’s personal contact information so you know where to send W-2s or any other relevant correspondence in the future.
Make a plan to share the news more widely
Work with the employee and their direct manager to decide how and when you’d like to communicate their departure and what details they feel comfortable sharing. Generally managers will need to at least let the immediate team know when the employee’s last day will be and how the transition will be handled. This can occur in a team meeting or via email depending on the employee’s preference. Generally once the information is shared with the immediate team, managers from other departments can decide how they’d like to let their teams know. For high-profile departures (e.g. more senior employees), it’s generally a good idea for managers to share the information in a meeting so they can answer their team members’ questions and address their concerns.
Have the employee create a transition plan
What are the employee’s regular tasks and responsibilities? Which accounts do they manage or have access to? Do they have any projects that they won’t be able to wrap up before their final date? Will they be transferring certain responsibilities to their team members? Have the employee work with their manager to come up with a transition plan, which should include a list of responsibilities, any relevant information needed to take them over, and either a recommendation or assignment for who will pick up these duties once they’ve left. Whenever possible, the person who’s leaving should arrange time to train their teammate, introduce them to vendors or customers, and answer any outstanding questions.
Conduct an exit interview
This is your opportunity to get candid feedback about the employee’s experience, which you can do either in a written survey, an interview, or a combination of both. Your goal is to collect information that can help your organization improve. For more guidance, check out our Pyn on How to conduct an exit interview.
Celebrate their time and say goodbye
Look for ways to mark their departure and show your gratitude for their contribution. This might include organizing a goodbye lunch or virtual happy hour, a card or something like a Kudoboard signed by other employees, or a personalized gift. Depending on the size of your organization, managers and team members might be the ones to organize these types of activities, but in smaller companies it can make sense for the HR/People team to be involved as well.
Share ways to keep in touch
If you have an official alumni program, Slack group, or newsletter, make sure the employee knows about it and has the ability to opt in. Similarly, if you encourage referrals from alumni, let them know how they can stay informed of open roles and refer people.
Collect company assets and turn off access to user accounts
Make sure employees return any physical assets like company laptops, cell phones, keycards, or badges. If they’re working remotely, provide detailed instructions on how and when this should occur and send them any necessary packing materials or labels. Make sure IT has their specific end date and time so they can shut off access to email and other digital tools accordingly.
Employee offboarding checklist for involuntary departures
When you’re offboarding employees due to involuntary departures, many of the steps are the same, but you’ll often be working on a much tighter timeline and you may also need to take extra care to maintain confidentiality or sensitivity (especially when someone is being let go for performance or conduct reasons). And even more than with voluntary departures, you’ll definitely want to consult with your legal team to make sure you’re following your local and national employment laws. Here are a few of the key steps to include in your checklist.
Ensure that the dismissal is in line with your company policies and previous actions
Before making the decision to let an employee go, you’ll want to consult with your legal department to ensure you’re following local employment laws and protecting your company from unfair dismissal lawsuits. For example, you may need to demonstrate that you’re being consistent in the way you discipline all employees or document all the steps of their dismissal in an audit trail.
Inform key stakeholders
As with voluntary departures, it’s essential to inform key stakeholders like IT, benefits, and facilities. Especially in cases where there’s concern about sensitive data or systems access, IT or facilities may need to remove access within a very short timeframe, so it’s a good idea to work with these teams to come up with the protocol for a few different scenarios, especially with remote and distributed employees.
Take care of necessary paperwork
This can vary depending on the specific circumstances of the departure, but may include PTO payout, 401k rollover information, non-disclosure or non-compete agreements, and requesting up-to-date email/mailing address for any future communication. In the case where you’re offering a severance package, make sure to go over the details and give the employee time to process and ask questions.
Collect company assets and turn off access to user accounts
As mentioned earlier, this may be extremely time-sensitive and there may be special instructions when employees are working remotely, so this is one task where it’s critical to plan out the details and brainstorm different scenarios.
Communicate the news to the rest of the company
This is both incredibly important and an area where many companies struggle. While you want to respect the privacy of the employee who is leaving, you also need to communicate what’s happening—especially when the person who’s leaving is a leader or early member of the company. You can prepare a statement or list of talking points for managers to share with their teams that includes the basic details such as the employee’s name, their last day, and the transition plan (or at least the fact that a transition plan is forthcoming). It’s also an opportunity for managers to remind their teams that involuntary departures are not taken lightly, to assure them that their roles are not at risk, and to provide a point of contact in case they have any questions or concerns. In cases where a senior or long-standing employee or large number of employees are being let go, it can be a good idea to send a company-wide email or call an emergency town hall meeting with your CEO or other leader to talk everyone through the news.
Special considerations when managers are offboarded
When managers leave, the impact of their departure tends to ripple throughout the company since they have such an impact on the day-to-day experience of their team members. In addition to the steps included in the previous sections, here are a few special considerations for offboarding managers.
Ask managers to recommend a new or temporary reporting structure
This will likely be part of their transition plan, but it’s a good idea to explicitly ask managers to list each person on their team and make a recommendation about who should become their new or temporary manager and share any relevant documentation such as professional development plans or 1:1 meeting notes with the person stepping into this role.
Communicate the new reporting structure as soon as possible
In the case of voluntary departures where there’s time to prepare, managers can be responsible for sharing the new reporting structure with each of their team members and facilitating a handover. But in cases where the departure is involuntary, sudden, or for senior leaders who oversee multiple teams, you’ll want to have a plan to inform everyone in the company. In addition to sharing the new reporting structure, use this as an opportunity to acknowledge that this will be transitional period that may be challenging and share any information you can about next steps (e.g. are you planning to backfill the role, reassign someone from a different department, or promote someone from within the team?).
Make sure each team member has what they need to continue working
When offboarding a manager, one of your primary goals is to minimize the disruption the team members experience. As part of the manager’s transition plan, make sure they create clear steps for what team members should do about anything that’s in progress such as projects that are underway, budgets, and their performance reviews.
If time allows, hand over duties thoughtfully
In the cases where a manager gives ample notice before their departure, make sure they invite the new or interim manager to attend their team meetings and 1:1s so they get a chance to know team members and how things have been run in the past.
Provide a point of contact
Even in cases where managers try to tie up any loose ends, unanticipated issues might still pop up. And of course when a departure is sudden or unexpected, their team members are likely to have a lot of questions. Provide a point of contact—whether it’s another manager or someone on the HR team—so they know where to go if they have questions or get stuck.
Collect feedback
Manager departures are (hopefully!) a rare occurrence, but this means your process for offboarding them might not be as smooth as it is for other team members. Be sure to take time to ask team members what they found most difficult about the process (either in a survey, focus group, or combination of the two) so you can better prepare the next time.
Departures are a critical part of the employee lifecycle and not something to be taken lightly. By creating a thoughtful and structured offboarding process, you’re showing respect to those who are leaving—and those who are staying.