10 steps that will ease the process

Employee offboarding is a significant process that is done in almost every corporate job, whether it’s due to layoffs, retirement, or personal reasons.

The offboarding process in the IT sector specifically is a sophisticated and sensitive process that needs to be illustrated through an offboarding checklist to be done adequately, as the employees’ access to secure customers’ data needs to be revoked to protect the customer’s privacy, their work needs to be smoothly transitioned to their replacements without affecting the workflow, and their finances need to be settled and cleared.

It’s also essential to regulate their legal rights to avoid any upcoming issues. Doing this will maintain a positive, efficient work environment and a positive relationship between the employees and their bosses. If you are a boss, you should know the hassle of such a process. But all of this can be managed by following this offboarding checklist.

Our first listed step in the offboarding checklist is how you can prepare the employee for his departure.

You should know how to approach the employee with such news if the decision is coming from your place; you should be professional and considerate; avoid giving short notice as much as you can; and you should know where he is mentally in his work environment.

You should then communicate with him or her about the expectations and needs of all parties and then proceed with the rest of the preparations.

It is important to review the company assets and know what the employee has access to, whether it’s online accounts or the company’s files.

It’s also important for you to ensure that the data related to their work is backed up and secured. This is very important during preparation.

The second thing to tick off in your offboarding checklist is how to document and manage accessibility. The company assets that got reviewed and the employee’s access to them should be revoked during employee offboarding, either data resources or applications.

Also, it’s crucial to deactivate their access very quickly in the case of employee termination, for fear of any disloyalty or treason.

You should change the passwords, either the password that accesses the company’s account or the company’s email, as this will stop the ex-employee from receiving any information that belongs to the company or any chance for them to email others as a representative of the company.

According to Beauty Identity, 83% of ex-employees admitted to using their company accounts after leaving the company.

You must carefully restrict which workers, contractors, and other people have access to certain areas of your system and data storage in order to comply with SOC 2’s security measures. The bottom line is that access should be restricted as much as possible, ensuring that only those who have a genuine need for access may get to your data and that even these people are only given access to the parts of the system they actually require.

If you want to follow SOC 2, It’s required for maximum security that you control the access of the employees to the parts of your system and data storage; the access should be limited as firmly as it can be so that employees who really need such data can get to it.

In the case of employee offboarding, you have to revoke their access immediately. You must provide the necessary documentation during your SOC 2 audit that demonstrates that only active employees can access your data, that this data is individually administered and kept to a minimum, and that access is promptly removed when an employee leaves or is terminated.

Next on our offboarding checklist for tech companies is how you are going to plan the transition and the work handoff process. You should start by considering the new candidates as soon as possible and determining the needed qualifications. If the employee is the one resigning and he or she was outstanding in their work, you may ask him or her about some recommendations.

Once you know who is taking over, you should use the experience you had with the previous employee to determine whether they should receive any type of training. You should ask the offboarding employee to gather any documents and sources and hand them to whoever will replace him.

In a positive and stable work environment, you can discuss with the offboarding employee the possibility of them training their replacement so that they know how the workflow is done, and when they are officially onboarded, they will cause little to no interruption to the workflow. This is super important for all tech companies.

In any off-boarding checklist for managers, it’s an important responsibility to gather any company-issued devices, including smartphones, laptops, hard drives, USBs, and access badges.

Please do not assume that the employee will remember on his own.

You or an assigned employee should make a list of the offboarding employee devices and tools that were given by the company and track the return process every now and then.

You can contact the employee to schedule a time to collect the assets, but you have to let the employee know that they are responsible for returning all company assets in good condition.

Once you have inspected the returned assets, go and update the asset inventory records to reflect their status.

As an additional step, you may dispose of any unwanted assets. If the assets are no longer needed by the company.

Your offboarding policy should require that any personal data that belongs to the offboarding employee be adequately and safely removed. From the company’s accounts or the devices that they should return. The company should have clear guidelines about the removal of the data. Several guidelines should be tailored according to the type of data you are handling; this can be discussed with your team to learn everyone’s point of view. The data must be securely removed by specialized employees; this can be easily done in tech companies since they usually have a cyber security department.

Next on our offboarding checklist is how you will deal with the offboarding employee’s colleagues and team. You should discuss with the outgoing employee who and when the rest of the company will know. Communication here is very important for the success of the whole offboarding process and for maintaining a good relationship with your ex-employee in the future.

Whether you or the off-boarding employee will notify the rest of the employees, you need to make sure there are no disruptions or complaints. They should be reassured that such a decision is for the company’s goodwill and that they should separate their personal associations from their professional lives.

During the subsequent onboarding process of the new employee, you should discuss with them how they will welcome him or her and how they will help them do their best in their early stages at the company

One of the most important things that you should prepare for very carefully is compliance. There are a few important questions that you should ask yourself or the HR manager. The offboarding policy and procedure should entail whether the company has an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) or non-compete policy, and if it does, make sure that all the papers are done.

If not, you should start considering one or both in your offboarding process in HR.

This will ensure the confidentiality of the sensitive records and information that the employee has.

If the employee has the option of having continued insurance and benefits, he deserves to know about them.

A fantastic step that would be life-changing for your company is to create an alumni network. Many companies now, like McKinsey and Company, treat themselves as universities, where the employees are students who will eventually, for any reason “graduate”. Believing in the concept that nothing lasts forever.

This network will be extremely beneficial for the ex-employees, as they will be engaged with each other. Some companies, like Amazon, offer courses that upskill their ex-employees so they can be hired by another company or even rehired by them.

This would also make it easy for the ex-employees to have referral letters from their former managers and seniors.

While you are going through your IT offboarding process, you should think of some additional considerations related to the tech field, like using a centralized system for tracking and managing employee accessibility to systems and applications. That should be a

Also, if the company is dealing with any third-party vendors that provide licenses and software, they should be notified that the employee is not employed by the company anymore. This is essential to do so that the employee’s access to any third-party systems or applications is also revoked.

In our last step in the offboarding checklist, we will talk about how you can measure the offboarding process’ success. This is important in order to get learning outcomes and key measurements that can benefit you in the future. Many scores or measures are universal, and you can actually create a tailored one for your company with the HR team.

Offboarding Score, for example, is a score that is given by the onboarding employee after his or her exit; it measures the support that was given to the employee in your company and various other things, like how digitally implemented your company is.

The offboarding Engagement Rate is another example, which indicates how engaged the departing employee is in your offboarding journey. This can be measured by seeing how often the employee goes into your digital offboarding tool, how fast the employee finishes paperwork, etc.

Another thing to measure is Offboarding Task Completion, where you simply measure the number of tasks completed by the offboarding employee. If you see a large number of tasks completed in a timely manner, then the Offboarding process is well underway.

You are now done with your offboarding checklist. I wish you a smooth and stable process. You have to know that this can be customized to your company’s systems and needs. Some may recommend conducting an exit interview to get feedback from your employees; this will help you identify areas of strength and weakness.

As a last piece of advice, whenever possible, arrange a goodbye party for your loyal departing employees, even if they weren’t overachieving in your company. No doubt they will appreciate that deeply, and it will give them a great push in the next step of their career journey.