What Is the Process of Offboarding an Employee?

While terminating an employee or seeing them leave on their own terms isn’t always easy, it doesn’t have to be a pain. Effective offboarding processes help to protect both the employer and the employee—and yet, all too often, employee offboarding is treated almost as an afterthought. 

Offboarding includes things like conducting an exit interview, collecting company-owned hardware, and auditing each employee’s various user accounts and passwords. It’s that last item that tends to prove the most difficult, especially when the average company uses dozens of different apps—each of which can pose a security risk if not properly deactivated or reassigned to another user. 

This underscores the power of employee offboarding automation, which empowers organizations to efficiently and securely manage the process. How does it work, and what are the benefits of employee offboarding automation? Keep reading for the answers.

Why Is Offboarding Important? 

An organization’s employee offboarding process is meant to protect the interests of both the employer and its employees, and makes it easier for those relationships to end on good terms. Simply put, the way a company offboards its employees demonstrates a commitment to treating its people fairly and with respect, making it a more attractive place to work.

Even though offboarding is associated with the end of an employee’s tenure, it’s interesting to note that companies with well-designed offboarding processes are also better at engaging and retaining their employees. When compared to their counterparts, these companies “have 11% more employee engagement” and “retain 71% of their employees,” according to Aberdeen research.

Finally, how a company offboards its employees can have a major impact on their security and ability to effectively do business. As many as one-in-five (20%) companies “say they have experienced data breaches by ex-employees,” according to TechRepublic. 

What Is the Objective of Offboarding?

The number one objective of employee offboarding is to ensure that the employer-employee relationship ends on positive terms. It plays a role in how employees feel about their time and the company, and how the company treats its people. This, in turn, can lead these employees to leave positive company reviews or recommend the employer to other potential candidates.

The other, equally-important objective of employee offboarding is to protect the rights and wellbeing of both the employer and employee. Consistent and efficient offboarding processes also protect the company and its properties, greatly reducing the chance of a potentially disgruntled former employee compromising their cybersecurity posture and key assets.

What Is Included in an Offboarding Process?

While no two offboarding processes will be identical, there are a number of key offboarding process steps or stages that they should include, related to things like:

• Access: Revoking the employee’s access to the company’s network and systems, including disabling their company email accounts and other login credentials.

• Backups: Creating secure data backups and transferring important data to the appropriate individuals or departments.

• Hardware: If the employee has been using company-owned equipment, either in-office or as a remote worker, all hardware will need to be collected—this also includes things like security badges or keycards.

• Licenses: First, you’ll need to take inventory of the different software applications used by a given employee, so you can methodically reassign or deactivate the accounts of now-former employees. This can be time-intensive and prone to human error, making it a great candidate for automation.

• Compliance: Before the employee’s access is revoked, an audit can help to determine whether the employee hasn’t accessed company assets or applications from any unusual or unauthorized devices, so additional steps can be taken to protect those systems from any unauthorized access or usage once the employee has been terminated.

Over time, a company can develop its own offboarding process flow chart or offboarding checklist to serve as a step-by-step template for offboarding one—or multiple—employees. By creating a repeatable offboarding template, companies can save valuable time and minimize security risks. It also provides them with a starting point from which they can evaluate whether certain aspects of their offboarding process checklist could benefit from automation.

There are several different ways companies can automate aspects of their employee offboarding processes, including things like:

• Initiating the offboarding process based on custom-set triggers or API calls.
• Revoking access to company-owned or managed systems, networks, and applications.
• Recovering, transferring, and archiving data and assets through automated workflows and task delegation.
• Managing, deactivating, and reassigning software licenses, as appropriate. 

With Lumos, it’s like you have an auto-pilot by your side—it’s easy to automate employee onboarding and offboarding processes while you’re busy doing other strategic tasks. To round out this article, let’s touch on some of the benefits of employee offboarding automation.

What Are the Benefits of Automating the Employee Offboarding Process?

The number one advantage of automated offboarding processes is security. As we mentioned earlier, all too many companies are experiencing data breaches caused by former employees—data breaches that are, by and large, preventable. Companies that rely solely on manual processes endanger their own security when they’re not able to quickly and effectively revoke terminated employees’ access to the company’s networks, systems, and applications.

Another benefit of automation is that it makes employee offboarding much more efficient, saving countless hours (especially for organizations with large headcounts) and preventing the potential for human error.

Ideally, audits of individual employees’ access controls should be occurring on a regular basis, not just at the points of onboarding or offboarding—especially as new applications are adopted by the organization and licenses are being assigned. A platform like Lumos, which enables companies to automate these processes, also makes it easier to monitor and review who has access to what—and, just as importantly, whether they should have such access. This also leads to smoother audits and the ability to more easily navigate reporting and compliance requirements.

Save Time with Lumos’ Unified Access Platform 

At Lumos, we’ve created a one-of-a-kind solution for automated on- and offboarding, as well as identity governance and other aspects of SaaS management. If you’re ready to learn how you can save time—and money—with Lumos, don’t hesitate to reach out to book a demo today!