It’s obvious that a great onboarding process for the new employees is essential for your company and future productivity however, the importance of offboarding is often overlooked.  But why? Properly offboarding your employees would be just as important since it has a tremendous effect on the company brand and culture.

What is offboarding?

Long story short offboarding is the opposite of onboarding, so it’s the process when the employee leaves the company whether they are leaving voluntarily or involuntarily. It can include several steps, but here are some common examples:

• Reallocating the past employee’s responsibilities
• Sharing the past employee’s knowledge
• Taking back keys and equipment
• Deactivating profiles and access rights
• Having an exit interview (giving feedback to the employee and receiving valuable feedback from them)

As you can see a proper offboarding process just makes life easier for everyone. The leaving employee can easily manage their remaining tasks and they won’t be bothered with random questions e-mails and rounds in the office after their formal goodbye, and in the other hand their successor can manage their new focuses more efficiently. And what about the employer?

The eNPS and brand aspect

As NPS aka Net Promoter Score shows the likelihood of a customer recommending a company, a product, or a service to a friend or colleague the eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) shows the likelihood of an employee recommending the company to their network. So, it’s easy to see that it’s equally important to engage your current employees and keep a good relationship with your past employees to build your brand as a great employer through these promoters.

How to create your offboarding process?

Considering all these aspects, the main goal of the offboarding process is to make the transition as easy and smooth for all the participants as possible. The past employee should feel valued and respected during the end of their journey to feel satisfied with their past employer and the employer should avoid all future inconveniences (from personal to brand related and legal issues).

We created a small to-do list which may help you with creating your very own stress-free and easy offboarding process

Communicate about the departing employee

Don’t forget to stay respectful while you inform co-workers, HR, whoever about the leaving employee

Plan the work handoff and facilitate the process

As the employer, you have a key role in finding the successor and making sure they get every needed knowledge and material from the leaving employee.

Create a list of equipment that you need back

It just makes the life of your leaving employee so much easier. What do you need back? Laptops? Keys? Cards? Just make a list!

Conduct an exit interview

The exit interview is an extremely important part of the offboarding process because it provides a space to collect valuable feedback from the employee. Find time for it!

Do not forget the personal aspect

Leaving a company is not only about tasks and passwords and as an employer it’s your tasks to provide space for your leaving employee to say goodbye. Throw a farewell party, recognize the amazing things this employee achieved, get a gift or just write down your best wishes. Believe us, it means a lot not only for the one who leaves, but the whole organization.

Stay connected

The goodbye should not be final. Leaving may not be permanent and even if we ignore the fact that many employees find their way back to a past employer during their lifetime… a trusted former colleague in your company’s professional network is always a great addition.

The IseeQ Way

And how should an offboarding process look in action? Here at IseeQ we are mainly following the explained steps, however we have an addition: Usually we are not only colleagues but friends too. -It is not that hard if you share an office with less than 20 people- so the process is always highly personal, hence we are focusing on the individual who is leaving us.

After handling all the other official matters a space for feedback in the form of an exit interview is crucial. It gives us a chance to understand both the experiences of our offboarding co-workers and gives us access to their valuable opinions.

The other important part of our offboarding is a farewell party, to which we prepare with personalized gifts and messages for the leaving teammate. The goal is simple: we want to showcase the fact, that the time we spent together was valuable for the whole company and even if the formal connection ended the personal can last. After all the end of the offboarding process is not a goodbye, it is just a see you later.