Offboarding Is Just As Important As Onboarding
Organizations of all sizes continue to hear about the importance of new-employee onboarding as it relates to employee engagement and overall retention. But many have found that the days of tracking all of these functions manually or in a spreadsheet are over. They are looking for better ways to organize the new-hire onboarding process and increasingly are moving toward paperless, interactive solutions to do so.
Once an employee is fully onboarded, most companies then utilize an HR and/or Payroll software solution to manage employees through the duration of their employment. This is often where things like paid time off, pay increases, and performance reviews are kept. Again, keeping these types of records in a single, automated place streamlines the workflow and helps keep employees happier.
But how about when an employee leaves the organization — either voluntarily or involuntarily? Do you have a definitive process to offboard that person?
Offboarding Defined
Like employee onboarding, employee offboarding will vary significantly from one organization to another. Along those same lines, because there are a variety of things that must be done/tracked when an employee leaves, there’s a case to be made that automating this process is a good move.
As employees move on from your company, below are some common things that may be part of your offboarding process:
- Retrieve office keys / entry swipe badge
- Retrieve company laptop and/or phone
- Confirm date of last paycheck
- Provide COBRA information
- Provide retirement plan options upon termination
- Conduct exit interview
- Provide copy of any non-compete or NDA agreements signed by employee
- Setup auto-forward of the former employee’s corporate email
There certainly are many other things that might fall into this list, but it’s easy to see these are not trivial items. As with new hire onboarding, you may choose to manage these tasks in a physical checklist or in a spreadsheet. Likewise, there are solutions emerging to help automate this in the same way as new-hire onboarding. Whatever methodology you choose, be sure to have a process in place to avoid exposure for your company and to make things as smooth as they can be.
To learn more about how ExactHire can help with your onboarding and offboarding processes visit the resource section of our website or contact us today!
Image credit: Delta B-727 (1970’s) 
by Hunter Desportes (contact)
