How Do You Automate an Exit Process?

Automating employee exit processes through an effective offboarding program is a way for companies to save time, manage risk, and preserve their reputation among other benefits. One of the most important aspects—especially from a cybersecurity or regulatory perspective—is removing access for terminated employees. 

But what are the key elements of the exit or offboarding process? What are the challenges it poses, and how can employee offboarding automation solve many of them? Keep reading for the answers to these questions, and more.

What Is the Employee Offboarding Process?

While every organization’s offboarding process should be tailored to its specific needs, there are certain steps that virtually every company will need to undertake in one form or another. With that in mind, your company’s employee exit process checklist should include, at a minimum:

• A face-to-face (in person or virtual) exit interview.
• Working through a custom employee offboarding checklist.
• Meeting with HR to address issues related to benefits options and similar employee (and organization) concerns.
• Gathering company assets like access credentials, as well as laptops and other hardware.

What Are the Challenges of Employee Offboarding?

Even though it’s something every employer must navigate, the process of offboarding employees can be time consuming and fraught with potential risks. Some of the key challenges include:

Managing Time Effectively

In order to fully offboard an employee, the organization must start with a full picture of their account credentials and access controls, so that they can be appropriately handled (through deactivation or reassignment, for example). The longer it takes to handle an employees’ accounts, the greater risk of unauthorized access the organization faces, creating a potentially grave security concern. An automated offboarding solution, by contrast, can save companies an incredible amount of time, whether you need to offboard a single employee or many. 

Preventing Data from being Compromised or Lost 

Especially in cases where the employee is not leaving on mutual, positive terms, the potential for a former employee to create security vulnerabilities through unauthorized access is very real, and can be costly. By efficiently and effectively offboarding employees, including through the use of automation, companies can greatly reduce their level of risk.

This point also extends to intellectual property. For software companies or organizations that work within the tech industry, the last thing any company wants is for its primary offerings to be compromised and/or copied by competitors. 

Navigating Compliance, Regulatory Issues

When employee offboarding processes aren’t adequately thorough, not only is there a risk for data being damaged or lost; it can also result in compliance violations for improperly managed/secured data. These violations can lead to financial penalties as well as significant disruptions to business operations, depending on the scope and severity.

Preserving the Company’s Reputation

A company’s reputation—as it relates to the business itself as well as how it treats its employees—is one of its most valuable assets. A positive reputation helps the organization to develop constructive customer relationships, and it also helps to attract and retain talent. 

By treating employees (even those whose time with the company is ending) with respect, companies can keep their reputation a positive one. Conducting face-to-face or virtual exit interviews is a great way to uncover any potential issues and ensure that employees leave the organization on the best terms possible.

Minimizing Costs

Considering the fact that the average organization uses well over 100 different software applications, it’s important for companies to quickly deactivate, disable, or reassign the various account credentials of departing employees. Actually, it’s more accurate to say the average company pays for licenses for over 100 different apps—in reality, a given employee probably uses far fewer than this count in their daily work. 

With that in mind, then, imagine how the costs must add up when all of these licenses continue to be paid for, month after month, despite not even being in use. Efficient employee onboarding processes help to ensure that all costs associated with a given employee are appropriately handled upon their termination.

What Is an Example of a Manual Process for Offboarding an Employee? 

It’s difficult to imagine a modern-day employee offboarding process that is entirely manual, and for good reason: it’s simply too time consuming, and getting it right is just too important. 

Think about the 100+ applications statistic, for example. The energy, effort, and time required to audit every single employee’s access controls on an app-by-app basis makes it a monumental task. And when you consider the inevitably of at least some minor human error entering the mix, a strong case emerges for automating employee onboarding processes.

What Are the Benefits of Automated Offboarding Processes?

The benefits of automated offboarding processes are highly compelling, as automation can solve each of the challenges of manual onboarding, resulting in outcomes like:

• A significant amount of saved time and energy.
• A greater degree of data security, including the protection and preservation of intellectual property.
• An easier path to maintain regulatory compliance and avoid costly penalties.
• A positive reputation for the company, especially among former employees.
• Reduced costs for the organization.

What Is the Automation Process Strategy for Employee Offboarding?

An increasing number of companies understand that automating at least certain aspects of employee onboarding and offboarding processes is virtually essential for modern companies—and yet, it’s not always easy to know where to start. 

So, how do you develop a strategy or framework? Consider the following 5 steps in automation process strategy development:

1. First, determine which elements of the organization’s employee exit policy and procedure will benefit most from automation. Then, you can prioritize the elements that will save the most time and play the most significant role in mitigating potential risk as you move forward.

2. Set specific goals and milestones for the organization. Automating something as complex as the employee offboarding process isn’t as easy as just flipping a switch. Rather, it takes time—especially when you’re first starting to work with automation. 

3. Evaluate potential automation tools. As you review various offerings, keep your company’s objectives and priorities at the forefront, so you can tune out the marketing noise and make solid, strategic decisions. 

4. Generate buy-in from stakeholders, to ensure that objectives are aligned and that there is mutual agreement as to the benefits and ROI of automating using the chosen solution.

5. As you begin to implement offboarding automations, also evaluate how well your chosen approach/solution is working, so you can course-correct as needed.

What Are Examples of Automated Processes in Employee Offboarding?

Several aspects of the employee offboarding process can—and, really, should—be automated. But not every automation platform is going to be right for your business and its objectives. At Lumos, we developed our platform to function like an auto-pilot so you can have a reliable way to streamline and automate your exit processes. 

Explore Lumos Auto-Pilot 

With Lumos, you can save time and manage risk through customizable workflows and automations for onboarding and offboarding employees, including the ability to:

• Auto-remove user access for both SSO and non-SSO apps.
• Instantly find accounts of terminated employees and take action.
• Deliver automated access to apps via employee self-service.

These process automation examples only scratch the surface of what this powerful platform can do. You can learn more today by visiting our website or reaching out to book a demo.