What is Offboarding?

Importance of a Well-Planned Offboarding Process

As a globally distributed company, you do not want to tackle high turnover rates. 

Here are the benefits of seamless offboarding that make it so crucial: 

• Enhanced employee engagement: 
  Effective employee offboarding is directly proportional to enhanced employee engagement. If you proactively make the employee exit process smooth and easy, they are most likely to leave the company with positive feelings. This enables them to recommend other candidates to join and even refer customers. 

• Lower risk of reputational damage and higher data security: 
  Employees leaving the company have nothing to gain or lose from it. Hence, a negative offboarding experience can lead them to badmouth the company. They may also speak about their poor employee experience with their former place of employment. 
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  This can lead to the potential risk of reputational damage, making it harder to scout for talent. A positive work relationship with one’s company lowers this risk and ensures that your company secrets and critical data are kept secure once the employee leaves. 

• Overall boost in productivity: 
  Offboarding can significantly affect an employee’s journey through your company. Workforce management, including offboarding, can also directly affect employees' interactions with and perceptions of the technology and services that drive your business. ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library framework for IT service lifecycle management, includes a workforce management practice that addresses offboarding.

Benefits of Offboarding for Employers and Employees

Here are some more benefits of seamlessly off-boarding employees, especially if you are a foreign business handling globalized Human Resources:

• Smooth transitions: A smooth exit process for employees ensures a seamless transition. Employees are more likely to take accountability and properly hand over their responsibilities, leading to smoother business operations and fewer disruptions. 

• Knowledge transfer: A well-structured offboarding process can enable employees to share valuable knowledge and expertise with the remaining team so they can effectively take over tasks.

• ‍Building goodwill: Respectfully treating employees during offboarding boosts their positive experience with the company and leaves a lasting impression. This can cause them to even return (boomerang hires) in the future or enable them to provide strong referrals.

The Offboarding Policy: Why You Need One

An offboarding policy is like a formal set of guidelines that outlines the steps and procedures required for efficiently managing an employee’s departure. It helps reduce potential risks related to offboarding and maintaining professionalism. Your employee exit policy should outline the following key components: 

• Process consistency: 
  It should establish a clear guideline for employee exits to ensure a seamless and fair experience.

• Compliance:
  It should address all legal and regulatory prerequisites. This includes final paychecks, tax forms, and benefits termination and is necessary to avoid penalties.

• Knowledge Transfer: 
  It should include all the necessary steps for handovers and documentation. This ensures that crucial knowledge is limited only within the organization.

• Exit Interviews: 
  It should include feedback sessions to gain a deeper insight into employee experiences. This will enable you to identify potential rooms for improvement.

• Legal Safeguards: 
  It should clearly outline confidentiality obligations, intellectual property rights, and non-compete clauses. This will mitigate data security risks.

Offboarding Checklist for Employees

Ensuring that you have a well-structured employee offboarding checklist should be on your list of priorities, especially if you are planning to set up a business abroad. An offboarding checklist for employees should have the following key points: 

• Complete termination paperwork and notify key departments.

• Communicate the departure internally and externally as needed.

• Facilitate handover documentation and share with relevant stakeholders.

• Collect company assets and revoke system access.

• Process final payments and review binding agreements.

• Conduct an exit interview and thank the employee.

• Gather updated contact information and connect on professional platforms.

• Support remaining team members and initiate recruitment.

• Update organizational charts to reflect changes.

What is handoff template for smooth deboarding resignation employee?

When employees step down, transition to a new role, or take extended leave, they leave behind a gap in skills and knowledge that needs to be addressed. 

A handover template helps bridge this gap by equipping the successor for success, reducing disruptions, and maintaining productivity. 

This ultimately ensures a smooth transfer of responsibilities.

Offboarding an Employee: Key Steps

Here is a step-by-step guide to offboarding an employee smoothly:

• Notify relevant teams: 
  Notify the HR teams, Finance, IT, and Security departments about an employee's departure so they can initiate offboarding tasks such as asset retrieval and final payroll adjustments.

• Host an exit interview: 
  Although optional, this step is crucial to gaining valuable feedback about the company and can ensure a smooth transition for existing employees and the team.

• Retrieve company assets and terminate access: 
  If you have provided company assets, retrieve them or ensure they are returned. This includes devices and gadgets, badges, ID cards, keys, etc. To prevent unauthorized usage, terminate the departing employee's access to digital and physical resources belonging to the company.

• Provide support: 
  Assisting employees with their final pay benefits or emotional and career guidance makes up for a seamless and positive offboarding experience.

Employee Exit Process: Handling Voluntary and Involuntary Exits

The offboarding process of voluntary and involuntary employee exits greatly differs. Here’s a tabular comparison for each scenario:

Best Practices for Employee Offboarding

With these practices, you can proactively make employee offboarding smooth:

• Maintain clear communication to ensure a smooth transition and positive relationships.

• Conduct exit interviews to gather valuable feedback for organizational improvement.

• Plan knowledge transfer to retain critical insights and reduce disruption.

• Retrieve company property, including equipment and access credentials.

• Provide support with final payments, benefits, and post-employment resources.

• Celebrate employee contributions to leave a lasting positive impression.

• Check-in with remaining team members to address concerns and maintain morale.

Offboarding vs. Onboarding Process

As a company with a globalized team, you must know the differences between onboarding and offboarding an employee. Let’s look at some of the key differences in the table below: 

The Role of HR Tech in Offboarding

HR tech is steadily advancing and is starting to streamline offboarding processes. With top-tier HR tech tools, you can easily enhance offboarding efficiency and ensure a smooth transition for the existing employee and your company. 

Most importantly, HR tech can help automate notifications across departments (IT, finance, security) to inform them of the departure. 

This ensures that all tasks, such as collecting company assets and terminating system access, are completed on time.

HR tech platforms can also help collect valuable feedback during exit interviews if you hold any. This can help you understand the reason behind their exit and identify areas for improvement to reduce the turnover rate.

Examples of HR Tech Tools for Offboarding

Here are some examples of tools that streamline the offboarding processes, ensuring compliance, efficiency, and an overall positive employee experience:

• Okta:
  It offers integrations and supports different types of workers with strong onboarding and offboarding features.

• Qandle:
  Designed for startups, it automates offboarding with just one click.

• Rippling:
  This tool speeds up offboarding in 90 seconds and helps create new job openings after an employee leaves.

• OneLogin:
  It provides affordable pricing and customizable features and suits different industries' offboarding needs.

The Impact of Offboarding on Company Culture

A well-handled exit process for employees strengthens company culture by showing employees that they matter. 

When employees leave on a positive note, they stay loyal and engaged, some even returning as ‘boomerang’ employees. 

This positive experience improves employee retention and boosts your company’s reputation, making it more attractive to current and potential employees and customers.

Strengthen Your Exit Processes with Skuad

As a foreign-based company, handling onboarding and offboarding can get overwhelming at one point, especially when you’re managing employees directly.

What if we say that there is a platform that can exit processes and the entire holistic process of onboarding and human resource management? 

Skuad is a platform that allows you to have the cake and eat it later. As one of the top EOR (Employer of Record) services with an impressive clientele, Skuad’s team of dedicated experts can also help you with compliance checks and payroll management. 

Book a demo today!

FAQs

1. What does offboarding mean?

Off boarding meaning refers to the exit process of employees, i.e., when they leave the company due to retirement or voluntary or involuntary resignations. 

2. Is offboarding the same as termination?

Offboarding is a long preparatory process for an employee’s exit from a company. It can be for various voluntary or involuntary reasons. Termination is the final action taken by the company to terminate an employee's employment.

3. What are the risks of offboarding?

A negative employee experience can lead to reputational harm and security risks without seamless and respectful offboarding.

4. What are the steps of offboarding?

The formal steps of offboarding an employee from a company include notifying the employee, handling handovers, retrieving company assets, and processing final paperwork. Another optional step can be to conduct an exit interview.