How offboarding software saves you time – and minimises organisational risk
Let’s be honest: employee resignations are nearly always a headache, because it means there’s so much extra admin to do, on top of all your other duties. Let’s take a look at all the tasks that need to be done as part of an effective offboarding process – and then explore a tool that can help you manage it all: offboarding software.
What to do when an employee resigns
There are a number of things you need to do when an employee hands their notice in:
- Documentation: Letters need to be created and distributed that outline the finish date, final pay, and any contractual agreements – such as confidentiality and restraint of trade.
- Equipment: Items need to be returned, such as the company vehicle, company phone, security access logins, keys, swipe cards, ID cards, and the return of any PPE or uniforms.
- Handovers: The employee’s work load and clients need to be handed over to another staff member, including client communications, files, documentation, processes, and any other knowledge. The sooner this process is initiated, the better, so that the person taking over the role has the opportunity to ask questions while the previous employee is still available.
- Exit interviews and surveys: Get valuable feedback that can help ensure the success of new hires.
How to find the time for all these offboarding tasks?
As soon as an employee resigns, the clock starts ticking for you to accomplish the offboarding process. And by initiating the offboarding process promptly, you have the maximum possible time to capture knowledge and information from the departing employee.
Yet the reality is, in most businesses, that the offboarding process is rarely thorough, efficient, or timely.
This can actually create significant areas of risk for your organisation, especially around:
- Restraints of trade issues.
- Customer dissatisfaction due to poorly managed handovers.
- Financial loss due to company equipment not being returned.
- Data loss due to access logins not being revoked.
- The employee having a poor offboarding experience and spreading negative comments about your organisation in the industry.
That’s why it makes sense to take the offboarding process seriously, and implement it in a thorough and consistent way. Though this may be challenging to do manually, there’s a tool that can help you with the process: it’s called offboarding software.
How can employee offboarding software help you?
Offboarding software helps you in a number of ways:
- Automatically generate letters using templates: All the necessary documents are created automatically in a few clicks, based on the employee’s job description and pay rates. No more having to work this out manually or retype the information– the offboarding software takes care of it.
- Easy offboarding checklists: The checklists in the offboarding software are super handy when it comes to tracking the return of company equipment, for handover tasks, and also for exit interviews.
- Delegate and monitor progress: The offboarding tasks can be delegated to others – and you can quickly run reports on the completion status of the offboarding tasks, so you know exactly where things are at.
- Automatically send exit surveys: The built-in survey functionality in our offboarding software means you can capture important information from departing employees. You can then run reports to analyse reasons for leaving, and evaluate survey responses, providing important feedback to HR and the management team.
- Save time: Because the offboarding software takes care of the process almost automatically, you’ll save on valuable time and be able to keep focused on your role where you add the most value to your organisation.
- Maximising the employment notice period: As the offboarding software should be initiated as soon as an employee resigns, you have the maximum amount of time possible to capture knowledge from your departing employee, so that high quality handover documentation can be created.
- Minimise risk: By having a thorough and consistent offboarding process, you minimise organisational risk around restraints of trade, customer dissatisfaction, financial loss, data loss, and negative word of mouth.
Introducing the Offboarding module in EMS Hub
The tool we’ve developed and use for employee offboarding is the Offboarding module within EMS Hub, which is a powerful suite of HR software.
