Turnover is expensive, and so is poor offboarding. It might look like your leaving employee has made their mind and there’s nothing for you to gain in this situation. You might be wrong. Here’s why.
Let’s look at your resigning employee. What would they do once the leave your organization. Here’s just a few things:
- Leave a Glassdoor review
- Write a post on LinkedIn
- Respond to LinkedIn messages from inquiring candidates (“How was your experience working for this company?”)
- Talk about your company at industry events/meetings, formal and informal
- Become (or stop being) your customer
- Talk to a journalist about their experience
…The list goes on.
Your employer brand is at stake here. And much more – your reputation as a whole.
The key to manage your reputation is to streamline offboarding experience that creates advocates rather than haters. Offboarding in post-covid times, namely in a remote/hybrid setting, is a double challenge. Follow these tips to ensure your leaving employees are happy and your reputation is safe.
Offboarding process automation
Administration is the least enjoyable part of offboarding. Make it easy for your employee to wrap up their job, sign the necessary documents, and hand over tasks. Offboarding checklist is a great solution to keep everything under control. Dedicated applications, like the Boarding Web App by FourVision, allow you to create custom checklists and assign relevant stakeholders to each task. For remote/hybrid organizations, offboarding administration automation is a must.
Quality offboarding interview
It’s a conversation you need to take seriously. And the most important part is to show appreciation to your departing employee. Articulate how specifically they contributed to your team and organization and which talents can make them successful on their future jobs. Once this is done, you can ask for feedback. What went wrong? What could be done better? What advice would they give to the management? The list of question is yours to compose, but only ask questions you’ll follow up on.
Offboarding event
Be it a farewell party, lunch, drinks, just a cup of coffee with some cake, or a Teams call for remote workers, your offboarding ritual matters! It allows to say goodbye informally and create a positive closure for both your leaving employee and their team.
Staying in touch
Offboarding marks a new step of your employee journey — alumni experience. In a world of social media, staying connected with your former employees is super easy. But it’s important to make this a priority on a company level. For many global businesses, alumni programs have shown their efficiency. Start small by sending an annual alumni newsletter and expand by hosting alumni events once in several years. Make sure that interested managers and recruiters are there to connect and potentially re-recruit your alumni.
