Offboarding: What It Means And Why It Matters

A complete cycle of progression

 

If your organization provides a consistent experience from start to finish, you send a strong message that you are who you say you are. Taking time for an effective offboarding process shows current and prospective employees that your organization values them for more than their contribution to the bottom line.
 
While onboarding and performance management get widespread attention from HR, optimizing your offboarding process receives less notice. But offboarding is an essential part of maintaining your organization’s reputation, optimizing your current employees’ working experience, and preserving networking opportunities. 

Offboarding is all the decisions and processes that take place when an employee leaves an organization. It’s part of an extended analogy that compares the employee lifecycle with an ocean voyage—they join the organization through the onboarding process and leave through the offboarding process.
 
The complexity of onboarding and offboarding processes depends on the organization, but as in the analogy, the more time and care you take with these processes, the better experience your employees will have. 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 your organization to end with walking the plank.
 
Both onboarding and offboarding can have elements of uncertainty and risk for employees and organizations alike. Without careful communication, both sides may question the motivation of the other. During onboarding, this often manifests in nervous excitement as the new hire and the organization test the fit of the new employee.
 
During offboarding, however, the uncertainty is tied to the decisions that led to the employee leaving. In the case of employee resignation, the employer may wonder if there is any way they could have convinced the departing employee to stay. And when employees are terminated or laid off, they may question their employer’s true motivations for letting them go.
 
An effective offboarding process helps reduce the chance that misunderstandings will persist after the employee moves on. When you take the time to get a clear understanding of the employee’s experience, you and your employee can part ways with additional opportunities for networking, development, and growth. 

Taking 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 an entry on the onboarding checklist. Employees want to know what their future with your company holds—whether they’re deciding to apply or reviewing their everyday work experience.
 
A report from Execu|Search found that 86 percent of professionals said they would change jobs if they were offered more opportunities for professional development. A study reported in Fortune went further, showing that the main reason most employees in leadership positions left for new opportunities wasn’t due to insufficient salary or poor management—rather, it was due to boredom and long hours.
 
While you have control over how your organization presents itself, your employees have an impact on your reputation as well. A study from Software Advice found that more than 50 percent of job seekers checked a company’s job reviews on Glassdoor before applying for a job. What’s more, nearly 50 percent of those who checked online employer reviews did so before doing any other job searching activity. It makes sense—no one wants to waste time applying to organizations with one-star reviews.
 
Your offboarding practices give you a final chance to demonstrate your organization’s values to your departing employees, to prove that your organization is what it says it is. This goes a long way toward creating an employer brand that’s deeper and stronger than simple marketing. 

Offboarding is just one of several important conversations that need to happen between employees, managers, and leadership during the employee lifecycle. But while the benefits of regular communication include a stronger sense of purpose and better work outcomes, personal insecurities can cause minor frictions to build up into major issues. These insecurities are summed up in one common phrase:
 
“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.”
 
A great workplace isn’t one that minimizes its flaws with effective PR measures. And of all departments, HR likely best understands the importance of resolving issues instead of covering them up. As Cassie Whitlock, Director of HR at BambooHR, put it in a recent presentation, HR deals with all the ways that “it” can hit the fan—whether “it” refers to legal issues, payroll difficulties, office romance, employee disagreements or the hundreds of other challenges that crop up as organizations grow. HR knows that the fan is always on, and that it takes work to protect and preserve a great employee experience.
 
It can be difficult for some leaders to get out of the cartoon ostrich mentality and tackle their employee experience issues, especially if they believe that failure will damage their reputation with their superiors or erode employee 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.
 
Effective offboarding can’t be a surprise or an afterthought. Your offboarding process should flow naturally from your regular pattern of employee communication. Emily White Hodge, Director of HR and Operations at New Moms, a non-profit operating in inner-city Chicago, recently implemented this performance management practice: “Every staff member has weekly coaching with their supervisor. Our philosophy now is: don’t wait for the annual review. Do it every week. There should be nothing that is a surprise on the yearly evaluation. We’re not waiting for a moment to have a magical conversation; we’re more nimble and we’re making changes faster.”
 
There will always be an element of the unexpected in offboarding non-contract employees. But with regular, open, and appropriately transparent manager-employee communication, there’s a lower chance of a shock to employee or employer during offboarding. 

Preserving open communication with employees is key when it comes to aligning their talents with the needs of your organization. When (and most of the time, it’s when, not if) an employee’s career path leads in a different direction than your organization can provide, a careful and thorough offboarding process can leave the door open for reconnection.
 
Recruiters call these re-hires boomerang employees, and the practice is becoming more common as the competition for talent gets tighter. Open communication can make all the difference in a successful re-hire. Keeping track of previous employee performance information can help recruiters weigh them against other candidates.
 
In Practice: An Offboarding Timeline
Now that we’ve established the importance of offboarding, here’s a general guideline to consider when going through the offboarding process:


 
While all of these steps may not apply to terminations or reduction in force, this list can help you navigate the tasks involved in successful offboarding. We also have resources with best practices for exit interviews and excellent exit interview questions. 

Examining and investing in your offboarding process can lead to a virtuous cycle of learning from your organization’s mistakes and improving them in the future. And whether your employees return with new skills or part forever as friends, offboarding can prove to your former, current, and future employees that your organization values their progression and is interested in changing for the better.
 
This article first appeared here.