Employee offboarding describes the separation process when an employee leaves a company. The offboarding process might involve a phased transfer of knowledge from the departing employee to a new or existing employee; an exit interview; return of any company property; and various processes from the company's human resources, information technology, or legal functions. [1]
An employee may leave a company through resignation, termination of employment and layoffs, retirement, or for other reasons. When this happens, the company will face several risks. These may include incomplete projects, loss of communication with clients, security risks, compliance risks, and other factors. [2] An employee offboarding process is generally designed to mitigate risks and potential losses in the separation process.
Offboarding often includes the collection of feedback from the exiting employee about their experience in the organization and possible improvements to its culture. It is considered the final phase of an employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and exit or offboarding. [3] [4]
Employee offboarding consists of numerous steps and workflows. [5] These may include:
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Employee offboarding includes several best practices. [7] [8] It should be a positive experience for the employee and the company. This would include formally acknowledging the employee's time at the company and the value they created. It should also be a time when companies collect valuable feedback on improving the overall employee experience and culture and transferring knowledge wholly and efficiently. It is a common practice to facilitate knowledge transfer by making documentation an ongoing part of every employee's experience from when they are onboarded to when they leave. This includes the continuing creation and updating of SOPs. Termination of employment on the best possible terms makes ongoing communications possible. This can benefit the employee who might need referrals for future employment or copies of documentation. It can also benefit the company when knowledge is not entirely transferred, and follow-up is necessary.
Documentation at the time of employee offboarding will reduce potential issues. In addition to current SOPs, an employer should request and receive a formal resignation letter. The employer should also provide documentation to the employee, such as a record of benefits, tax documents, a final paycheck, and a final record of income earned.
Network administrators, human resources managers, department managers, and others responsible for different aspects of the offboarding process should be notified, with clear next steps. These might include account closures, login changes, and other security measures. Documents stored locally or on the cloud should be transferred to new stakeholders.
In the exit interview, clear and accurate reasons for terminating employment should be documented and filed for future use. If the employee left on good terms, then it should be made clear that the possibility of a return is likely in the future.
Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, or personnel.
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Employment is a relationship between two parties regulating the provision of paid labour services. Usually based on a contract, one party, the employer, which might be a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a co-operative, or any other entity, pays the other, the employee, in return for carrying out assigned work. Employees work in return for wages, which can be paid on the basis of an hourly rate, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does, the prevailing conditions of the sector and the bargaining power between the parties. Employees in some sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payments or stock options. In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits may include health insurance, housing, disability insurance. Employment is typically governed by employment laws, organisation or legal contracts.
A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization. Originally, layoff referred exclusively to a temporary interruption in work, or employment but this has evolved to a permanent elimination of a position in both British and US English, requiring the addition of "temporary" to specify the original meaning of the word. A layoff is not to be confused with wrongful termination. Laid off workers or displaced workers are workers who have lost or left their jobs because their employer has closed or moved, there was insufficient work for them to do, or their position or shift was abolished. Downsizing in a company is defined to involve the reduction of employees in a workforce. Downsizing in companies became a popular practice in the 1980s and early 1990s as it was seen as a way to deliver better shareholder value as it helps to reduce the costs of employers. Research on downsizing in the US, UK, and Japan suggests that downsizing is being regarded by management as one of the preferred routes to help declining organizations, cutting unnecessary costs, and improve organizational performance. Usually a layoff occurs as a cost-cutting measure. A study of 391 downsizing announcements of the S&P 100 firms for the period 1990-2006 found, that layoff announcements resulted in substantial increase in the companies’ stock prices, and that the gain was larger, when the company had prior layoffs. The authors suggested, that the stock price manipulation alone creates a sufficient motivation for publicly-traded corporations to adopt the practice of regular layoffs.
In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.
Termination of employment or separation of employment is an employee's departure from a job and the end of an employee's duration with an employer. Termination may be voluntary on the employee's part (resignation), or it may be at the hands of the employer, often in the form of dismissal (firing) or a layoff. Dismissal or firing is usually thought to be the employee's fault, whereas a layoff is generally done for business reasons outside the employee's performance.
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Dismissal is the termination of employment by an employer against the will of the employee. Though such a decision can be made by an employer for a variety of reasons, ranging from an economic downturn to performance-related problems on the part of the employee, being fired has a strong stigma in some cultures.
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