Utah expert HR tech company explains why it's essential to offboard employees

With businesses conducting layoffs across various sectors, BambooHR, a Lindon-based software company, explains it's vital for business leaders to make sure employee reductions are made responsibly.

HR plays a significant role in ensuring layoffs are conducted with compassion, understanding, and care for those affected. Your organization values people – and offboarding workers when they leave shows employees that your business understands the importance of an effective employer-employee relationship.

If your organization provides a consistent experience from start to finish, you send a strong message that you are who you say you are. Taking time for an effective offboarding process shows current and future employees that your organization values them for more than their contribution to the bottom line.

While onboarding and performance management get widespread attention from business leaders, optimizing your offboarding process receives less notice. But offboarding is essential to maintaining your organization's reputation, optimizing your current employees' working experience, and preserving networking opportunities.

What offboarding means

Offboarding is the process that leads to the formal separation between an employee and a company through resignation, termination, or retirement. It encompasses all the decisions and processes that take place when an employee leaves. This may include:

• Transferring that employee's job responsibilities.
• Deactivating access rights and passwords.
• Turning in equipment.
• Conducting exit interviews to gather feedback.

Why the offboarding process is important

When an employee leaves, they become either an advocate or an antagonist to your company. Advocates will speak highly of you and can send potential new employees your way. Antagonists will not recommend your business to anyone, and that can hurt you in the long run. Try to use offboarding to turn all employees who leave into advocates.

An effective offboarding process helps reduce the chance that misunderstandings will persist after the employee moves on. When you take the time to get a clear understanding of the employee's experience, you and your employee can part ways with additional opportunities for networking, development, and growth.

Offboarding and employer brand

Taking time to understand the employee experience shouldn't be reserved for offboarding when it's too late to act. Strengthening connections between employer and employees should be a continuous process, not just an entry on the onboarding checklist. Employees want to know what their future with your company holds—whether they're deciding to apply or reviewing their everyday work experience.

How job seekers, employees, and the world at large view your company is known as your employer brand. Setting up an effective employer brand is essential for recruiting and maintaining healthy talent in your organization. But your employer brand reflects all parts of the employee experience, including offboarding. It's not enough to give employees a strong start and see how long they stick around.

While you have control over how your organization presents itself, your employees have an impact on your reputation as well. A study from Software Advice found that more than 50% of job seekers checked a company's job reviews on Glassdoor before applying for a job.

With this new level of transparency available to job seekers, every decision your organization makes can have a ripple effect on your employer brand. It's not enough to get employees on board and count on their salary and benefits to keep them from jumping ship. It takes a consistent positive employee experience in every department of your organization and throughout the employee lifecycle to earn good reviews from former employees and build a positive employer brand.

Your offboarding practices give you a final chance to demonstrate your organization's values to your departing employees, to prove that your organization is what it says it is. This goes a long way toward creating an employer brand deeper and stronger than simple marketing.

In practice: an offboarding timeline

With the importance of offboarding established, here are general guidelines to consider when going through the offboarding process:

• Once you've received a letter of resignation or provided an employee with a termination notice, inform HR and IT of the departing employee and begin the offboarding process.
• After the employee has signed the letter of resignation, non-compete agreement, and other relative documents, be sure to provide the departing employee with links to their benefits documents. Additionally, be sure to issue a final paycheck and ensure yearly tax documents will be sent out.
• Begin facilitating job shadowing and redistributing projects among other team members.
• Schedule a date/time for an exit interview and facilitate honest feedback regarding the departing employee's experience at your organization.
• Once you've completed the exit interview with the departing employee, collect any assets belonging to the organization.
• Be sure to recognize the contributions of the departing employee and extend formal best wishes.

While all of these steps may not apply to terminations or reductions in force, this list can help navigate the tasks involved in successful offboarding. We also have resources with best practices for exit interviews and excellent exit interview questions.

A complete cycle of progression

Examining and investing in your offboarding process can lead to a virtuous cycle of learning from your organization's mistakes and improving them in the future. And whether your employees return with new skills or part forever as friends, offboarding can prove to your former, current, and future employees that your organization values their progression and is interested in changing for the better.

This story is sponsored by BambooHR, a Lindon-based software company for HR to ensure employees have the best experience.

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