When people think of employee offboarding it is often not given as much thought as employee onboarding. In reality, it is just as important and should be viewed as possibly even more important because it can give a company insight into their experience that they give to employees.
In this article, we break down 3 aspects of employee offboarding and why it is so important for a company to focus on.
Cutting Ties on Good Terms
The first thing to consider with employee offboarding is that you should cut ties on a good note in most cases. It is always better to end on a good note because that improves your brand image with society. If you end on bad terms, then an old employee could publicly trash your company and raise a lot of bad publicity towards it.
It is smart to end a relationship on good terms because it does not burn any bridges, and that is important in the business world. You just never know if you will need that old employee in the future or if they will be involved in your network. It is smart to never burn any bridges and a good offboarding program will prevent any bridges from being burnt.
Gather Insight to Improve Future Experiences
Another thing that is often overlooked with employee offboarding is the fact that it is a great learning opportunity for employers. When you are offboarding an employee, they are obviously done working for the company for a bit.
That is a great opportunity to gain insight into how their experience was and how you could improve the company. They are likely going, to be honest, and give constructive criticism that could really improve how the company will treat future employees.
Learning from mistakes that were made is a perfect way to improve a company. Any ex-employee in an employee offboarding meeting could easily set a company on a better path. Any company that does not gain insight from ex-employees’ experiences are leaving money on the table.
Cut Ties and Revoke Access
The last and major point that I will mention is that a major aspect to employee offboarding is cutting the necessary ties and revoking access that ex-employees have to information. If you have an employee that will no longer be working for you, then you need to make the proper adjustments, so they do not have access to the same things anymore
If you do not cut ties and tie up loose ends, your old employees could come back to burn you if they can still access confidential information that is none of their business. Revoking digital access and access to important information is a vital step in any employee offboarding process.
Hopefully, those three aspects of employee offboarding will show you how important of a process it can be. It is often overlooked, and it is not the right approach in my opinion. Any good company knows how important the employee offboarding process it is!
Interesting Related Article: “How To Elevate Employee Trust In HR“