Offboarding Employees: Why It’s Important and How to Do It Right
At Leap29, we have talked a lot about onboarding employees and the importance of having a clear employee onboarding strategy, especially for international employees. But, what do you do when it comes to offboarding an employee? Having a clear offboarding strategy for employees is just as important as your onboarding strategy. In fact, the way your employee leaves a company often influences their opinion of their time at your company and impacts your brand reputation. Meanwhile, there can be strict regulations in place in certain countries for when an employee leaves a company. In this blog, we look at the importance of an offboarding strategy and help with how to offboard an employee successfully.
What is offboarding and why do I need it?
While you may have heard of onboarding, you may not have heard about offboarding an employee. Essentially, your offboarding strategy covers how you will wave farewell to an employee taking into account employment regulations, an employee’s contract and of course keeping an employee’s exit as friendly a process as possible. While many do not want to spend additional resources on an employee that is leaving, having a clear, compliant and compassionate offboarding strategy is proven to boost overall employee satisfaction, avoid any disputes and keep your company’s reputation positive. After all, employees talk and finding out a colleague or a former employee at your potential new firm has been treated poorly upon leaving can cause negative atmospheres, toxic cultures and poor recruitment rates, especially if your business is operating in a new country and has therefore not established a solid reputation. It is important to have a clear offboarding strategy regardless of why an employee is leaving, whether it’s dismissal, the end of a temporary contract or resignation. Each company’s offboarding strategy will be different, and may differ depending on which of the above reasons an employee is leaving for. However, it needn’t be complicated. Below are just a few factors that could make up your employee offboarding strategy.
What is included in offboarding?
- Compassion at the core: Firstly, before anything else, it’s vital that you keep compassion and kindness at the heart of your offboarding strategy.While you may be disappointed an employee is leaving, or an employee may be being dismissed, keeping offboarding as friendly as possible helps to avoid any disputes.
- Compliance comes first: This will differ for each country, but putting compliance at the heart of your exit strategy is crucial.
- Focus on clear communication: Often, employee terminations or resignations can get swept under the carpet leaving a potentially awkward atmosphere amongst employees and the employer. By clearly communicating with both current employees and the employee who is leaving you can help to avoid this.
- Ensure an appropriate handover: Losing staff can hugely disrupt your processes. However, by having an effective handover this can be minimised as much as possible.
- Recruit a replacement: More often than not, when an employee leaves you will need to start recruiting a replacement and the sooner you start this process the better.
- Keep in touch: This final point may not be ideal for either party, but, if it is, then keeping in touch with former employees can be beneficial for both parties.
Offboarding an employee is never going to be a nice task on a company’s to do list. But, by having a clear offboarding strategy you can make the whole process easier for you, your company as a whole and your employee. A PEO or an EOR can help with employee management and therefore both onboarding and offboarding employees, taking the stress from your shoulders. Want to find out more? Contact our PEO experts today.
