Offboarding: How to Manage an Employee’s Departure

Offboarding is the process of an employee leaving the company. Far from being a simple farewell or good-bye, this is a process with a few steps that shouldn’t happen overnight! 🗺️

Offboarding encompasses the handling of administrative formalities, internal communication management, security processes, pre- and post-departure follow-up… And despite all the areas it impacts, many companies often neglect offboarding. This can lead to severe consequence that include:

• financial loss
• positions that become hard to fill
• increased workload for the rest of the team
• and a few other undesirable outcomes 😅

What’s more, offboarding is likely to become an even more common phenomenon! According to Gallup’s 2024 “State of the Global Workplace” report, 52% of employees are watching for or actively seeking new job opportunities.

So, how do we best manage employee departures with a professional approach? How can you offer your employees an exemplary offboarding experience and still turn this moment into an opportunity to boost your brand? Find answers to these questions in this article! 👇

• Understand that offboarding is not just an HR issue, it’s one for managers, too!
  • The financial side
  • The IT side
  • The marketing side
  • Other teams
• Best practices for offboarding
  • Understand
  • Act
  • Follow up
• The offboarding checklist: who does what, and when

Understand that offboarding is not just an HR issue, it’s one for managers, too!

Understanding that offboarding is an HR issue and a managerial one, too, is essential. This raises major challenges such as:

• collecting feedback on the quality of the employee experience
• maintaining a positive employer brand
• fostering a positive work environment despite the departure

But that’s not all! Every time an employee leaves the company, this causes stronger ripples throughout other teams than you might think.

The financial side

Turnover is a slow bleed that costs companies in the long haul. To ensure successful offboarding, the players in this division must anticipate a loss of productivity during the transition, revalue accounts to remain stable, but also anticipate the cost of replacement. In fact, Gallup estimates that the value of a new employee can be equivalent to half or even double the salary of the previous employee. So yes, losing talent does cost a lot! 💸

The IT side

Your IT department must ensure that sensitive information is properly managed when an employee leaves the company to avoid any data leaks or breaches. Beware of potentially fatal cyber-attacks! According to the Cyber Risk Report 2021, nearly one in six companies that were attacked in 2020 say they came close to bankruptcy. That’s why it’s essential to include the IT department in offboarding!

The marketing side

The departure of an employee can also influence the company’s reputation on the job market, degrading your ability to attract new talent or retain the talent you worked so hard to assemble. According to one study, 96% of candidates research employer brands when looking for a job. Glassdoor‘s website is one common place. It’s an aspect of turnover you shouldn’t ignore…

Other teams

Finally, offboarding is also a team affair! The departure of a colleague can have an impact on the morale and overall productivity of the team and its manager. It is therefore essential to put strategies in place to ensure that departures do not adversely affect the motivation of remaining employees.

But how do you manage all this with so many stakeholders? We’ll explain it all below! 👇

Best practices for offboarding

Now that you’re familiar with the parties involved in this process, let’s explore together the key steps you need to take to manage an employee’s departure from your fingertips. 👌

Understand

In the first phase of offboarding, there’s only one word: understanding. In other words, hearing out why the employee is leaving is the very first step in the offboarding process. Don’t forget: offboarding is an adaptive process! To manage an employee’s departure in the best possible conditions, you’ll need to adapt the process to the type of departure. There are two types of departure:

1. Voluntary departures. This occurs when an employee decides to leave the company on his or her own initiative. Often, this is to pursue new opportunities, or to meet personal needs.
   
2. Involuntary departures. These occur when the company decides to terminate the contract with the employee. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including an economic slump, poor performance, and professional misconduct.

3. Quiet quitting. This is a subtle phenomenon in which an employee gradually begins to disengage from his or her job without actually announcing his or her resignation. This type of departure can be detected by early warning signals such as changes in behavior or increased absenteeism. Keep in mind that these signs aren’t always obvious!

By understanding the reasons for departures, you’ll have a better grasp of how they’ll affect day-to-day operations, collaboration and team dynamics. It will be easier for you to move on to your next phase of offboarding: taking action! 🫵

Act

Now’s the time to truly start the offboarding process! Here are the key steps to follow, in order:

Coordinate and take care of the administrative side of things.

This includes coordinating with the IT, security, and other departments to ensure that all aspects of offboarding are taken care of. Next, tackle all the paperwork! 📑 Finalize financial, contractual, safety and other documents to ensure a well-organized, employee-friendly departure.

Check outgoing role documentation for updates

In every company, every role should count. When anyone leaves, you have to make sure things keep moving smoothly! That can include recruiting new people or redistributing tasks within the team. To accomplish any of this, you need to be sure that all documentation and processes relating to the departing employee are up to date and well organized.

The handover is the moment when the knowledge attached to a role is either passed on or lost. Documenting as you go, rather than in the last two weeks, is what makes the difference: that is the point of agile knowledge management practices, and of the AI tools that help surface and summarise what has already been written down.

The Holaspirit platform is the perfect support for this! This solution allows you to create, edit and organize publications seamlessly. Whether you’re looking to document roles, processes, policies, or strategies, it’s all possible on Holaspirit.

To find out how Holaspirit can help you optimize your documentation processes, request a personalized demo today! 👇

Run the exit interview

The exit interview is the one conversation where an employee speaks without having to protect their future in the company. It is the most candid source you have on your employee experience.

• Schedule it a few days before the last day, never on the last day itself: that leaves room for the questions that come afterwards.
• Have someone other than the direct manager run it, so the person censors themselves less.
• Ask open questions: what triggered the decision, what could have changed it, what was missing from the role.
• Read several departures together: one account is an opinion, ten converging accounts are a signal.

Without that last step, the exit interview turns into one more administrative ritual. A feedback culture is also tested at the moment someone leaves.

Reassure and communicate with your teams

A departure can often come as a surprise, but an often uneasy, disappointing one, right? 😅 Your teams, too, will feel and experience this “unpleasant surprise.” This can lead to a slump in motivation, productivity, even a loss of confidence. Make sure you communicate openly and regularly to reassure teams and address their concerns. Also, maintain regular communication with the outgoing employee in order to support him or her through to the end of the offboarding process.

The most important thing is to make this offboarding experience as positive as possible, and to encourage acceptance! For example, organizing a farewell party can be a good way of creating a warm and friendly moment to say goodbye. Find a venue, some drinks, some invitations and you’re all set! 👍 This is also an opportunity to show that departures are simply part of working life. 🤷

Choose the right communication tool

For optimal communication, nothing rocks more than communication tools! 🎉

These tools enable you to streamline your internal communication and facilitate information sharing. If information flows well in all directions, and your teams work in a climate of trust and harmony, your offboarding is on the right track!

You can accomplish this with Talkspirit, a communication and collaboration tool that lets you distribute information to your teams quickly and efficiently. For example, you can create dedicated channels to discuss the latest administrative details in chat, store important documents in the drive, and coordinate tasks on project boards.

To find out how Talkspirit can optimize your offboarding process and improve communication within your team, request your very own custom demo today!

Follow up

The last phase of offboarding is following up! Having accompanied the employee until his or her departure, we now need to maintain the link with the employee who has left the company.

Show your interest in your former talents, value their career path, continue to exchange with them and maintain a positive professional relationship (if possible)! This enables the employee to maintain a positive perception of the employer, to recommend him or her to his or her professional network, and even to consider a possible return to the company in the future. It’s also an effective way of staying connected and keeping in touch via LinkedIn or email.

At the same time, share news with your teams of what your former colleagues have accomplished! To this end, you can use your enterprise social network (ESN) to disseminate information in a transparent, purposeful, and inclusive way.

Is the offboarding finally over with, and the employee has moved on? Now make this practice a regular part of your corporate culture! By doing so, you demonstrate your concern for the employee experience. Your employees will better appreciate your investment in managing each departure with care and professionalism right up to the end!

What’s more, nobody is a better testament to your employee experience than your employees themselves. That’s why you should take these departures as opportunities to learn and grow. Organize post-departure meetings to gather feedback from your former talent, thereby improving the overall experience of all your employees! 🚀

The offboarding checklist: who does what, and when

A failed offboarding rarely comes from a forgotten step. It comes from a step everyone assumed someone else owned. The table below splits the tasks by stage and by team; adapt it to your local employment law and to the size of your organisation.

Two points deserve particular care. Cutting access: it is prepared before the last day and executed at an agreed hour, neither earlier (the person can no longer finish the handover) nor later (see our best practices for HR data security). And the redistributed workload: it is what triggers the next departures, sometimes in the form of quiet quitting.

A well-run offboarding reads like an onboarding in reverse: same stages, same stakeholders, opposite direction. If you are building both processes at once, our HR onboarding checklist follows the same logic.

A final word

The challenge of effective offboarding management is real! To manage offboarding successfully, you need to check off a number of boxes. First of all, you need to include all stakeholders, then follow through with that process in a coordinated way.

It’s not enough to apply these practices mechanically. The human dimension is central, so you should also promote benevolence, psychological security and inclusion. Listen to employees, and support them all the way! All your actions in support of well-being will boost employee commitment and productivity, as well as your attractiveness on the job market. So don’t forget: every departure can represent an opportunity for your company! ✨

PS: would you like to discover best practices for improving your talent retention and limiting the number of offboardings you have to manage? Download our white paper on the subject 👇

Access White Paper

In our white paper entitled “How to Build Employee Loyalty and Prevent Quiet Quitting,” you’ll find: the origins of the quiet quitting phenomenon, the main causes of disengagement at work, and which levers to pull to improve talent retention and squelch quiet quitting.

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