Employee Offboarding: What It Is, Why It Matters, And How To Do It Well

Ever left a job and still had access to your company email or shared drive months later? Yikes.
Each time an employee exits a business, there’s the potential for something to be left unfinished, presenting dangerous security breaches and potential leaks of company assets.
A solid employee offboarding process is vital for every organization—not only for security but also as a means of respect for each and every employee.
In this guide, we will explain why the employee offboarding process matters so much, how to streamline and improve it by taking a holistic employee lifecycle view, and the positive effects this can have for your organization, especially when it comes to compliance and security.
Employee offboarding is formally separating an employee from their company after resignation, termination, or retirement.
It consists of all steps and workflows that occur when an employee leaves, including:
Good offboarding ensures there are no loose ends or open access when an employee moves on. This way, there is nothing lost, and there are no opportunities for any data or security breach.
Offboarding also gives the exiting employee a chance to provide feedback about his or her role, and for the organization to better understand how to improve its culture and employee experience.
Many businesses are much more invested in onboarding than offboarding, and understandably so. The start of a relationship feels like a more fruitful point to nurture than the end of one. Yet a strong offboarding plan is just as, if not more important than onboarding for several reasons.
Offboarding is a discrete and important process. But it is also part of a larger picture—the employee lifecycle. This spans from long before an employee’s first day until long after the employee leaves.
The benefits in terms of employee productivity, organizational efficiency, and reduced risk are well worth the effort that goes into building a streamlined employee lifecycle. Understanding and planning for the entire employee lifecycle is an excellent way to improve retention, morale, and ROI on new hires.
It also reduces the likelihood that you’ll find yourself at the center of a breach or PR scandal. Having a broader picture of how offboarding fits into the employee lifecycle can help you define processes, plan, and make strategic changes that benefit your entire organization over the long run.
For more on the first part of the complete employee lifecycle, see our guide to employee onboarding. Now, let’s take a deeper look at a framework for streamlining and optimizing your offboarding process.
Effectively offboarding departing employees helps build a culture of security and compliance, and it protects you from liability. But that’s only the beginning of a long list of benefits the offboarding process brings once you part ways with an employee.
People are your company. Employees who stay on board will notice how the offboarding process is handled—and word-of-mouth travels. It can color views of your organization and skew it in a positive or negative direction.
Some of your employees will inevitably be in charge of helping to offboard employees. Developing clear processes will make their jobs easier while emphasizing that you take security and compliance seriously. Research shows that 70% of job candidates look to company reviews before making career decisions. More employee confidence ensures that your reviews showcase a healthy work environment worth joining. To do that, your offboarding process must be both human and empathetic.
Taking a people-first approach has the added benefit of improving your organization’s productivity. A good offboarding process will simplify life for your HR, IT, and leadership teams, and will also protect the company from negative perceptions.
Increased security
Customer data leaks or security breaches aren’t worth risking—and one of the best ways to avoid this is to develop tightly controlled offboarding processes. According to a recent IBM report, the average cost of a data breach is over $3 million.
A proper offboarding process dramatically decreases the odds that your company will be vulnerable to this type of attack.
You may also need to meet relevant guidelines and regulations for your industry and organization type. For many SaaS-based organizations, SOC 2 must be adhered to at all times. This and many other compliance frameworks require tight controls around access—specifically around offboarding.
Strong adherence to compliance is an important way to win customer trust and show that your business takes its security seriously. Good offboarding is integral to that.
With tools like Blissfully, a large part of the employee offboarding process can be automated. However, offboarding still requires a human touch. So parts of the process like exit interviews and gathering feedback are better handled with real-time human interaction.
Yet, for example, the process of access revocation to company data can be automated so it runs in the background while you finalize other aspects of the offboarding workflow.
Here are some key factors to keep in mind when refining your offboarding process. It starts with setting a positive foundation.
Whatever the reasons for the termination of employment, offboarding should always be a positive experience as part of the company’s last impression. You should put in the same effort as you would during onboarding.
Acknowledge your employee’s contributions, and interact positively about their time in the company.
An exit interview is an indispensable part of the employee offboarding process. Many employees may be hesitant to express their unguarded opinion while they’re still with the company to avoid conflict. An exit interview is a moment to get honest feedback.
Incorporate knowledge transfer efficiently.
Don’t wait until team members depart to start the knowledge transfer process. Instead, make it part of their ongoing work responsibilities. That way, they aren’t crunched for time as they finalize their last days with the company.
The single best way to show your existing employees your appreciation is to stay in touch and support them. This might mean asking their permission to contact them through either email or a preferred phone number. If they decline, take note of their decision and proceed accordingly.
With the onset of the great resignation and about a quarter of US employees working from home, remote employee offboarding is necessary. This will look like creating a preliminary setup along with a checklist that includes the revocation of access to sensitive data, monitoring the last few days of employee activity if the departure isn’t on good terms, and conducting virtual exit interviews.
The remote offboarding process stands to gain a lot from a predetermined removal process. Generally, the same steps to removing an in-house employee still apply.
As soon as a departure is finalized, the process should begin in earnest. We’ve created this checklist as a template for your processes. You can personalize it so it fully covers the specific needs of your company.
Blissfully is unique in how it connects all aspects of the offboarding process. Many tools cover one or some aspects of the process—yet Blissfully is built to manage the entire offboarding workflow across all teams and tasks. Blissfully helps you:
Our workflow engine gives businesses a ready-made offboarding checklist, plus a platform to customize and formalize the particular process for the organization, able to be repeated whenever necessary.
When you begin an offboarding process, whether it starts in your HR tool, or email client, Blissfully generates a list of steps to ensure a complete offboarding, as well as assigning the task to who is responsible. Each team can easily define its own steps, tools, and processes.
Blissfully’s workflows are also automatically recorded and can be easily audited. This means easy documentation for compliance audits, as well as an easy way to investigate any issues by going back and seeing if all steps were successfully completed.
Blissfully’s system-of-record provides a holistic view of what tools are being used by which department, at what level and through which license. This central source helps teams select and provision those tools to make sure your new hires have everything they need to be productive from day one.
Blissfully automatically freezes any accounts associated with the offboarded employee, preventing unauthorized data transfer. This can be done through your email or SSO provider, such as Okta.
Blissfully integrates with your email or SSO provider to allow an offboarding to be initiated in any tool, and it manages the de-provisioning of tools through those platforms as it maintains consistency across all tools in an organization. When using other tools, Blissfully will still track third-party completion.
Blissfully stores a backup of the offboarded account, along with any associated emails and shared files. This ensures there’s no data loss in the handover and enables you to delete the account to stop paying for the license and keep data to archive long-term.
Blissfully automatically transfers ownership of SaaS tools and billing, making vendor management more consistent, and ensuring that someone is monitoring spending on tools.
The matrix below compares Blissfully to the most popular options for offboarding solutions, whether it’s a single-sign-on/Identity and access manager such as Okta, SaaS ops such as BetterCloud, other SaaS management providers.
The employee offboarding approach outlined in this guide, when executed with a central platform in place like Blissfully, will make your organization a better place to work as it protects your valuable assets and keeps you from potentially fatal security breaches.
Blissfully provides a central platform to manage offboarding, ensuring that each exit is accurate, complete, secure, and auditable.
If you’re looking to streamline an employee offboarding process that works for you, Blissfully can help. We’re specifically designed with onboarding and offboarding workflows in mind to help teams function more efficiently. Start with a free demo here.