What Are the Guidelines for Offboarding an Employee?

Even though it occurs at the end of an employee’s tenure with the company, offboarding is still an important part of the employee lifecycle. By ensuring that employees are treated fairly and with respect—and protecting the company and its assets from security concerns—organizations can provide the best possible employee experience, from their initial onboarding all the way through the offboarding process.

With its importance in mind, you may be wondering how to successfully offboard an employee. If so, you’ve come to the right article. We’re here to cover basic topics like how to create an offboarding plan that works for your organization, the key inclusions for an employee offboarding checklist, and the advantages of employee offboarding automation with a platform like Lumos.

What Is the Employee Offboarding Policy, and Who Sets It?

An employee offboarding policy establishes guidelines and procedures meant to protect the interests of both the employer and the employee. While there are certain legal requirements that apply to employee offboarding, even in “at-will” employment states, companies largely create their own policies, sometimes working from an employee offboarding template or offboarding checklist.

What Is the Process of Offboarding an Employee?

While every organization is unique, the most successful companies tend to enact similar offboarding policies and processes. That’s because they’re all typically driven by the same considerations: respecting employees and their rights, protecting the organization from legal exposure, and ensuring that business operations are able to continue without disruption.

So, what are the standard onboarding process steps? They include:

• Revoking the departing employee’s access to the company’s networks, systems, and applications and disabling their email accounts and other login credentials to maintain ongoing security.

• Ensuring that any data related to the employee’s past and current projects are appropriately backed up and transferred to the right teammate(s) or department(s).

• Recovering any company-owned hardware or property, including laptops or tablets, mobile devices, and any physical access controls such as security badges or keycards.

• Auditing the employee’s various user accounts and credentials associated with different business applications, and effectively deactivating or reassigning software licenses.

• Conduct a thorough audit and compliance check to determine whether any unusual or unauthorized access or activity has occurred on the employee’s behalf, so any vulnerabilities can be identified and addressed.

What Does a Good Offboarding Process Look Like?

While no two offboarding processes will be identical, there are certain characteristics that define the most effective organizations’ policies and procedures. With that in mind, a good offboarding process is one that is…

• Fair: The onboarding process should be fair to both the employer and employee, protecting the employer’s systems and applications while respecting and preserving the employee’s dignity.

• Well-Organized: Especially in larger organizations, establishing a checklist or template helps to ensure that the offboarding process is consistent over time, and that nothing important slips through the cracks.

• Well-Communicated: When employees don’t know what to expect, it can cause unnecessary anxiety and stress. By being transparent and communicating what to expect as the offboarding process unfolds, employers can help to make it as smooth as possible.

• Respectful: Remember that every employee was hired for a reason, and just because they might be departing doesn’t mean they don’t still deserve respect and dignity—especially if they’ve been with the company for a while. Being fair, well-organized, and communicative are great ways to maintain respect throughout the offboarding process.

What Are the Benefits of Onboarding and Offboarding Process Automation?

Modern organizations looking to streamline and strengthen their employee exit policy and procedure are increasingly turning to automation. The key to successful automation? The right software platform. With Lumos, it’s easy to configure automations at virtually any stage of the offboarding process, 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.

What Are the Benefits of Automation?

Automating onboarding and offboarding process provides several key advantages, including:

• Efficiency: Automating the onboarding and offboarding process helps companies to save a great deal of time and energy, as opposed to “reinventing the wheel” every time an employee leaves the organization. 

• Cost Savings: Time is money, so the more time you can save through automation, the better. That being said, automation for the sake of automation isn’t the right approach—instead, focus on purposefully automating the process steps that will provide the most benefit.

• Employee Experience: An organization’s reputation—and, by extension, its ability to attract and retain high-quality talent—can be impacted positively or negatively by how it handles employee onboarding and offboarding. 

• Security: From the employer’s point of view, the ability to maintain an effective cybersecurity posture and ensure regulatory compliance are also key advantages of automation. Automating key steps like auditing auto-removing user access helps to save time without putting the company in jeopardy.

Of course, these examples only represent a fraction of what the Lumos platform can do for an organization. With Lumos, you can not only improve your onboarding and offboarding experience, but also control costs with SaaS management, save time with access reviews, strengthen identity governance measures, and so much more. Visit our website for more information, or to book a demo.