People are quitting their jobs at a record pace in what’s been called ‘the great resignation’. After working from home for months, with no commute and more time with family, many people have decided it’s time for a change. Workers are expecting flexible working and greater support for mental health from companies.

Given this, many more people will be going through the transition to a new job, a process commonly known as offboarding

The process involves various elements such as; expertise and knowledge sharing, exit interviews, recovery of assets, and finishing up the necessary forms and formalities.

Done correctly, offboarding makes your employees feel valued and appreciated throughout the ‘departing’ process. It strengthens an organizations relationship with them and leaves the employee with a pleasant impression of the organization.

The desire to start something new is not the only reason for people to leave an organization, others include; retirements, layoffs, relocations or maybe a disconnect with the company’s culture, values and goals. No matter the reason a good offboarding experience is important, for multiple reasons e.g.

• It helps the organization retain knowledge and expertise
• Offboarding employees are a reliable source of feedback. Departing employees provide a valuable opportunity to learn what’s going well and what’s not.
• They are great brand ambassadors. According to Glassdoor, 70% of job candidates look at company reviews before making the next move. If the offboarding process is poor, this can damage the relationship with an outgoing employee and impact their view of the organisation.
• They could return as future employees or even customers. Don’t burn your bridges

Below are a number of ways an intranet like GreenOrbit will assist in a smooth offboarding process

Offboarding checklist

An employee offboarding checklist details all of the necessary tasks that must be done when an employee leaves the company. It’s a check-box exercise so that HR managers can see quickly which activities have been completed and which are still to be done. The checklist template can be stored for easy access in a document folder on your HR Intranet site. The checklist could include some of the items below:

• Announce the departure to the team
• Provide the person leaving with their offboarding tasks
• Arrange exit interview
• Raise a requisition for a replacement.
• Initiate knowledge transfer
• Recover laptop, ID cards and, other company assets
• Notify payroll of final day so that they can process all outstanding payments
• Remove employee’s access workplace software/IT systems
• Redirect incoming emails and calls to another colleague

Exit Interviews

Exit interviews are a way to gather great feedback on your workplace, offboarding employees often open up more. They will provide a deeper look at your culture, day-to-day processes, management, and employee morale. Store an exit interview template on your intranet for easy access. Here are the top 12 questions to include from recruitment site Total Jobs

1. Why are you leaving?
2. Would you recommend working for this company to your family and friends? Why/Why not?
3. How would you describe the culture of our company?
4. What would you change about your job?
5. What would you change about the company?
6. How did you feel about your workload?
7. What opportunities were you given to develop in your role?
8. Did you feel you were given adequate training for the job? Why/Why not?
9. Did you feel your work was recognised? Why/Why not?
10. How was your relationship with your manager?
11. For how long have you been wanting to leave?
12. What could have been done differently to have made you stay?

You could store the results in a folder on the intranet, but you would probably want to make it restricted viewing by applying the necessary permissions

Show appreciation

Give the outgoing employee a ‘shout out’. This could be in a social post or if the employee had been there a long time, or made a significant impact a news story. Highlight their strengths, achievements, and significant contributions in the company. You could gather stories and snippets of information from other colleagues and publish as part of the tribute.

 Facilitate knowledge transfer

Your employees bring in so many skills and abilities and gain so much knowledge on their role and responsibilities. Unless it’s documented, this ‘corporate memory’ is simply lost once they leave. The next person in their role will have to start pretty much from scratch.

The knowledge transfer process allows them to document the vital points for your future employees and others in the team.

If processes and documents exist on the intranet, now is the time to get the person leaving to review them and get them updated with their implicit knowledge, either doing it themselves or collaborating with an intranet author

You could create a private area; a place to have discussions, share messages, files and media so that knowledge transfer can be managed securely, and stored for future reference

Raise a requisition for a replacement.

Hopefully you will be able to replace your outgoing member of staff, and that there is a process to follow with your HR teams to get this done. To speed things up don’t waste time on paper-based forms and complicated processes – get everything streamlined using an online form and workflow on your Intranet.

Update your organisation charts

Update your Intranet organisation charts with a vacancy, and then when the post is filled add the new employee to the hierarchy. Don’t forget to introduce the new employee to their colleagues and link to their profile

Throw them a party

This could be something formal where a form submission is needed in reply to an invitation

Or a less formal calendar entry announcing a gathering for drinks

GreenOrbit provides intranet software with everything you need built in - easy to use and easy to manage. Want to know more about GreenOrbit, contact a consultant for a personalized demo. https://greenorbit.com/book-a-demo/