The Ultimate Employee Offboarding Checklist: Free Download

Businesses spend a lot of time on their employee onboarding processes – where they set systems, procedures, and protocols to ensure that all new hires in the company have smooth and consistent access to all the tools and training they need so they can perform in their roles.

Simply put, offboarding – also known as employee exit management – is the formalized separation process undertaken when an employee leaves an organization.

If you don’t have an employee offboarding checklist, you aren’t on your own. 

According to research from marketing firm Aberdeen, only 29% of organizations have a formal offboarding policy in place. Another survey, by TEKsystems, revealed just 14% of IT leaders agreed strongly that their organization had an effective employee offboarding process.

Why you need an employee offboarding checklist

Whether an employee resigns, is terminated, or has been laid off, a consistent approach to the departure process is vital for your business because:

• It shows a commitment to your employees and their experience with your company throughout their entire lifecycle as an employee.
• There are benefits associated with departing employees recommending your organization as a good place to work to family, friends and colleagues.
• It can assist with rehiring good employees again down the track.
• It is an opportunity to gather important feedback from departing employees about the reasons for their departure so you can identify any trends and make amendments to your organization’s culture if necessary.
• It ensures the same deactivation and documentation of employees’ IT access rights. Insider threats can be a risk when employees depart with ongoing uncontrolled access to sensitive data.
• It emphasizes the company’s commitment to security and compliance.
• There is an improvement in productivity for managers, HR, IT, and other areas when an employee departs the organization and has an efficient and effective implementation process.
• Without a universal offboarding process, the approach being taken within your organization is likely haphazard, ad hoc, inconsistent, inefficient and may even leave your company vulnerable and exposed to risk.

Having a streamlined process, following a consistent steps and processes with an employee offboarding checklist, can help you overcome these risks and understand who in your organization has the appropriate responsibilities for handling departing employees.

To make it easier for you, we’ve created a free employee offboarding checklist template you can follow to ensure your offboarding process is as easy as possible and gives a consistent approach – with tasks to assign to different people in your organization.

What should go into an employee offboarding checklist?

The offboarding process is generally carried out over a much shorter period of time than employee onboarding.

You may need to change this for any custom needs your organization has, but in general, these are the things we have included in our employee offboarding checklist template that you should remember and not overlook:

1. Determine employee end date:

If the employee is resigning they will usually have to give the required notice under their contract or employment agreement advising when their last day will be. If they are being terminated (fired) or laid off (made redundant) their end date will usually be set by the organization. Whatever the end date is, this should be used to inform your timeline for the offboarding process.

(+5 more points)

2. Organize “handover” of responsibilities:

This is the responsibility of HR and the employee’s manager. The departing employee needs to provide a debrief to someone before they leave. Ideally this would be the person taking over their role, but recruitment times and processes don’t always allow this luxury. A manager or other team member should be allocated this responsibility. The handover should include:

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3. Information technology offboarding checklist:

These are the steps to allocate to your IT and network security teams to ensure the departing employee no longer has access to sensitive company systems and data. This include:

(+9 more points)

4. Facilities management:

These are the steps to allocate to your facilities or property management team – or whoever is responsible for this within your organization:

(+4 more points)

5. Human resources, finance and legal:

These steps should be allocated to the appropriate corporate services areas such as HR, payroll, finance and legal teams:

(+8 more points)

Download the full offboarding checklist for free 

How DeskAlerts can assist with your employee offboarding processes

When you need to communicate important information to the entire organization – or just to specific groups of employees – an internal communications software system such as DeskAlerts is a great tool to ensure that important information is delivered to those who need to see it in a way that can’t be ignored, skipped or missed.

DeskAlerts sends notifications to computers, phones and tablet devices and avoids getting lost in overloaded email inboxes.

For offboarding you can use it to deliver on tasks from your employee offboarding checklist template:

• Send alert notifications to specific teams, such as IT, finance, payroll etc advising them on a particular employee’s departure date and the tasks that they need to complete to ensure this happens smoothly.
• Schedule notifications in advance so you can also send reminders to the appropriate team members as the date and deadline approaches.
• Communicate the employee’s departure to the entire organization to keep everyone in the loop, and advise of any transitional arrangements for that team member’s work in the interim period before their role is filled.
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