Many companies have great processes for welcoming new employees, but only great companies also have a plan in place for exiting employees.
While employees can leave an organization through resigning, retiring, or being let go, it’s important that the company creates a process for how to handle these cases. Who takes over their responsibilities? Has all the paperwork been processed? What types of things can the departing members take with them?
These are all extremely crucial questions for an HR manager to ask. Improper offboarding is an issue seen across many businesses and industries. As you read this article we’ll explain this process, what can happen if you do it wrong, and how to fix these problems.
Offboarding is the process for handling an employee’s exit from your company. When someone resigns or is let go, there are a number of steps to take to ensure this transition is smooth for both the organization and the employee.
Generally, a good offboarding process will cover knowledge transfers, processing of documentation, reviewing departure policies (like severance packages), succession planning, and conducting an exit interview among other things.
Done correctly, this can lead to a stronger employer brand, boosted productivity, and better employee relations. These things can seem pretty obvious, however. What’s less obvious, and some would argue more important, is what can happen if you don’t offboard properly. Let’s take a look at what these problems mean and how we can fix them.
3 Problems with improper employee offboarding
Failing to properly offboard an exiting employee can result in three main problems for your company. These problems prove that offboarding is just as important as onboarding new employees to your organization. These are the three major problems that can arise with improper offboarding.
Poor culture
Most HR teams can keep a good pulse on the current company culture within their organization. This culture can quickly go in a negative direction when exiting employees are not properly offboarded.
Let’s take the example of an employee being let go. If they are improperly offboarded, they can become disgruntled with the process and that certain procedures were not followed. They are likely already upset with being let go in the first place and improper offboarding adds insult to injury.
Word then likely gets back to the current employees who become empathetic and hold resentment for the team carrying out the offboarding process, driving real divides in your organization.
Ruined reputation
Your employer brand and recruitment marketing efforts rely heavily on your organization’s onboarding and offboarding process. A company that is known for “giving the boot” when they let employees go will have a much more difficult time recruiting than one that has an established offboarding process and procedure.
With the advent of employer reviews on websites like Glassdoor, it’s incredibly crucial that you either create a strong reputation for your organization. (If you’ve offboarded poorly in the past and need to right your wrongs, consider using some sort of reputation management software to assist with this.)
Wasted spend
Take a moment to think about what happens to an employee who resigns from an organization and is simply just shown the door. Without proper offboarding processes in place, the business could still be bleeding money on an employee who is no longer with them.
This is called wasted spend, and it’s something we at G2 are very familiar with analyzing. Make sure to keep close track of what software every employee has access to as well as how much money is being spent on their memberships. Failure to do so could mean that you’re still providing resources to people who are no longer with your organization.
Developing a good offboarding process ensures that the exiting employee has access removed from your SaaS subscriptions, saving you money and opening seats for current or new employees.
How to fix it
So we know what improper offboarding procedures can result in, but how can we resolve these problems or prevent them completely? You can start by investing in offboarding software or an HR suite that contains these features. Using these products can help you automate the process and remove any subjectivity around an exiting employee.
Additionally, G2 Track is an incredibly powerful tool we developed in order to help organizations manage all their SaaS in one dashboard. It can help you identify what software you’re using, how often it’s being used, and how much money is being spent on it. Keep all this data together to help negotiate contract renewals, compliance, and invoices in a unified and clean view.
Protect yourself
The problems that can arise as a result of poor employee offboarding are completely avoidable. Take some time to develop these procedures and ensure you’re keeping a handle on your organization’s culture, reputation, and spending.
Finally, make sure your organization is secure by reading dozens of resources on our compliance hub.