In early 2023 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a stunning report: 50.6 million Americans quit their jobs in 2022, surpassing the previous year’s wave of voluntary departures (dubbed the Great Resignation). This troubling trend has motivated HR professionals to reevaluate offboarding, the process that leads to the formal separation between an employee and a company through resignation, termination, or retirement. Offboarding can help mitigate this trend by giving human resources teams an opportunity to gather candid feedback and to recommend actions that can halt further turnover.
Offboarding encompasses all the decisions and procedures that take place when an employee leaves. These may include:
- Transferring that employee’s job responsibilities
- Deactivating access rights and passwords
- Collecting equipment
- Conducting exit interviews to gather feedback
Essentially, offboarding ensures that there are no loose ends when an employee leaves the company. (Then no one has to e-mail them two weeks after their departure to ask for their ID badge, for example.) This process is also useful for helping organizations learn what they might be able to improve for their current and future employees. Plus, offboarding is necessary to ensure compliance and avoid unnecessary legal risks.
Three Key Goals of Offboarding
An effective offboarding process helps reduce the chance that misunderstandings and negative feelings will persist after the employee moves on. When an organization takes the time to get a clear understanding of the employee’s experience, both it and the employee can part ways with additional opportunities for networking, development, and growth.
Offboarding Protects the Company's Employer Brand
Taking the time to understand the employee experience shouldn’t be reserved for offboarding, when it’s too late to act. Strengthening connections between employer and employees should be a continuous process, not just a line item on the onboarding checklist. Whether they’re potential candidates deciding if they want to apply or current employees reviewing their everyday work experiences, people want to know what their future holds with a company.
An employer brand is how job seekers, employees, and the world at large view that company. Setting up an effective employer brand is essential for an organization’s recruitment and for its ability to maintain healthy talent. An employer brand reflects all parts of the employee experience, though—including offboarding. It’s not enough for a company to give its employees a strong start and then just see how long they stick around.
Surveys consistently indicate that two of the top reasons most employees in leadership positions give for leaving those roles are lack of opportunities for professional development and boredom—both of which contribute significantly to disengagement. These findings illustrate the importance of employee engagement throughout the employee experience from onboarding to offboarding and everywhere in between. In today’s economy, where there are more job openings than job seekers, most new hires are part of the vast majority who are willing to change jobs for greater professional development. How will they know whether an organization provides that development? Some of their best sources for information about this are current and former employees’ descriptions of their jobs.
Although an organization has control over how it presents itself, its employees, too, can have an impact on its reputation. Not only do most of today’s candidates check a company’s job reviews on Glassdoor before applying for a job, but they also tend to read those online employer reviews before doing any other job searching activity.2 This new addition to the job search process makes sense: after all, no one wants to waste time applying to organizations with one-star reviews.
When an employee leaves, they become either an advocate or an antagonist. Advocates speak highly of the company and will send potential new employees there; antagonists, on the other hand, won’t recommend the company to anyone (and might actively speak poorly of it). Because antagonists can cause damage in the long term, companies should try to ensure that all departing employees leave as advocates.
Because job seekers now have access to more information than ever before, every decision an organization makes can have a ripple effect on its employer brand. It’s not enough to get employees on board and just count on their salary and benefits to keep them from jumping ship. To earn good reviews from former employees and build a positive employer brand, a company must provide a consistent and positive employee experience in every department of the organization and throughout the employee life cycle.
Offboarding provides a final chance for a company to demonstrate its values to departing employees and to prove that the organization is what it claims to be. Meeting those expectations goes a long way toward creating an employer brand that’s deeper and stronger than simple marketing.
Offboarding Surfaces Employees' Pain Points
Offboarding presents a rare opportunity for employees to be truly candid about the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of their experiences at their organizationa. A great workplace doesn’t use PR measures to try to minimize its flaws but understands the importance of resolving issues instead of covering them up. To create a great workplace, HR professionals can lead the way by viewing offboarding as an opportunity to recognize issues and help departing employees feel heard—and then taking measured steps to help the organization grow from good to great.
Effective offboarding can’t be a surprise or an afterthought but should flow naturally from an organization’s regular pattern of employee communication. Offboarding is just one of several important conversations that need to happen among employees, managers, and leadership during the employee life cycle. Authentic feedback doesn’t always come easily, though: it can be difficult for some leaders to get out of the cartoon ostrich mentality and instead directly tackle employee experience issues, especially if they believe that failure will damage their reputations with their superiors or erode employees' confidence in the organization. But downplaying employees who decide to leave doesn’t remove the consequences of turnover—and in some cases, poor offboarding strategy can backfire and make the situation much worse.
Offboarding Leaves the Door Open for Boomerang Employees
Preserving open communication with employees is key to aligning their talents with the needs of the organization. When (and most of the time, it’s when, not if) an employee’s career path leads in a different direction than the organization can provide, a careful and thorough offboarding process can leave the door open for reconnection. Rehiring those “boomerang employees” is becoming more common as the competition for talent grows fiercer. Organizations are increasingly open to welcoming back former employees, often giving them higher priority during the application process because of their existing familiarity with the organization and its needs. Keeping track of previous employee performance information can help recruiters weigh them against other candidates if those former workers ever want to return.
Onboarding and Offboarding: What's the Difference?
Onboarding and offboarding are the bookends of an employee’s time at a company. The terms for those two processes come from an extended analogy that compares the employee life cycle with an ocean voyage: they join the organization through the onboarding process and leave through the offboarding process.
Although onboarding and offboarding are two very different parts of an employee’s journey, they require similar executions. More than a simple “you’re hired” or “you’re fired,” each process should be planned from start to finish, and all the paperwork should be carefully organized. Employees don’t want their onboarding process to be like leaping onto the deck as the ship pulls out of port, and they don’t want their last day with an organization to end with walking the plank. The more time and care an organization puts into these processes, the better the experiences its employees will have.
Both onboarding and offboarding can have elements of uncertainty and risk for employees and organizations alike. Without careful communication, both parties may question the other’s motivations. During onboarding, this uncertainty often manifests in nervous excitement as the new hire and the organization test their mutual fit.
During offboarding, however, the uncertainty is tied to the decisions that led to the employee’s departure. In the case of employee resignation, the employer may wonder if there is any way they could have convinced the employee to stay. Similarly, employees who are terminated or laid off may question their employers’ true motivations for letting them go.
Long-Term Benefits
Offboarding is an essential part of maintaining an organization’s reputation, optimizing its current employees’ working experience, and preserving networking opportunities. Investing in the offboarding process can help a company enter a virtuous cycle of learning from past mistakes and improving on them in the future. And whether employees return at some point with new skills or remain permanently separated from an organization, offboarding can prove to former, current, and future employees that the organization values their progression and is interested in changing for the better.