Welcoming an employee and sending them off again. They seem like two completely opposite activities, but in fact they are two sides of the same coin. Offboarding is in truth almost as important to an organization in terms of hiring success, but many organizations fail to manage this important point in an employee’s lifecycle. Offboarding an employee who quits is a pivotal data security moment. Here’s how to make it a priority.
What is Offboarding and Why Does It Matter?
Offboarding is a review of all the decisions and processes that take place when an employee leaves an organization. It’s the completion of a journey. A review of the development that took place on the voyage. It’s like the inevitable departure at the end of a cruise. It’s a complex process. So take the time to learn what’s really working and what needs to be improved.
Just as with recruiting and hiring, the more time and care you take with the offboarding process, the better the experience is for your employees, and the better the information you will gain from the experience. Employees who quit need to be managed out the door. Making sure that their access is revoked and that critical documents are no longer accessible to them is a big part of that process. Don’t allow them the opportunity to take important trade secrets of business documentation along with them. Revoking access to the network and ensuring data privacy from their last day on matters to the security of the company as a whole.
What Should Offboarding Achieve?
The complexity of onboarding and offboarding processes depends on the organization. But the goals are going to be the same no matter what. You want your offboarding to carefully communicate the information that an employee needs when leaving. It should set the team up for success beyond a team member’s departure. You want it to glean information about why an employee is leaving. Ask what could have been done to keep them. Or, if an employee is being terminated or laid off, they’ll need to know the process of leaving the company and reduce the chance of any misunderstandings that you don’t want to persist after they move on.
For employees who leave on negative terms, pay extra attention to data security. Offboarding without any semblance of strategy is sheer negligence. I can lead to productivity losses, security breaches, compliance concerns, or unnecessary costs. In today’s world of SaaS applications and cloud computing, you need to make sure that you are deprovisioning access to protect sensitive documentation. Whether that information can be accessed inadvertently or maliciously, the end result is the same. Make sure that an employee on their way out the door doesn’t have access to anything that can harm the business in their absence.
For help keeping a watch on your business critical documentation, connect with the team at Happy Faces Records Management today.
