# A Complete Guide to Employee Offboarding Learn how employee offboarding is key to your company's security and helps boost your reputation within your industry. #### Article Summary Everyone eventually leaves their job. When an employee exits, the employee offboarding process begins. Most companies have a basic offboarding system, but often the process isn’t thorough or efficient. In this post, we will talk about how to do offboarding right. ## **What Is Employee Offboarding?** Employee offboarding is part of the exit process, by which someone who is currently an employee transitions out of that role. The goal of an offboarding process is to ease the transition, both for the company and the employee. Remember: every employee who leaves under favorable circumstances is a potential future employee. How you manage their exit process influences what prospective employees will hear. While our goal in this post is to cover a variety of offboarding procedures, it's important to remember that some will differ significantly. Some steps below won't work when you're unexpectedly firing someone. ## **Offboarding an Employee** Let's dig into what makes an excellent offboarding experience. Every situation and company is unique. For example, if your business is focused on healthcare, employees might handle sensitive information. In this case, your offboarding process might be more vigorous. Regardless of your industry, the steps below provide an outline for your company’s offboarding processes. ### **Identify an Exit Event** If someone is leaving your company, everyone involved in the offboarding process must know about it. This is true whether the person is leaving voluntarily or without notice. You'll want a central location to track all the work your company undertakes. The key here is a well-defined list of steps with clear owners for each step. ### **Knowledge Transfer** Many companies handle knowledge transfer poorly, and it becomes a hasty last-minute attempt to get an exiting employee to write down "all the important stuff" about their job. In reality, knowledge transfer is an institutional skill. Regular effective knowledge transfer also helps build stronger teams and gives your employees the context they need to do their job well. ### **Technical Offboarding** Technical offboarding means disabling or removing your employee's digital access across your company's footprint. This likely involves disabling access to email accounts and de-provisioning accounts to third-party software. ### **How Can I Do Technical Offboarding Right?** Think of your offboarding process as a mirror of your onboarding process. Ideally, when you hire someone new, you have an automated system that either provisions user accounts automatically or assigns administrators to do so by hand. ### **Exit Interview** Not every company performs an exit interview. But when the time is right, the exit interview is a powerful tool for ongoing company improvement. Take the time to ask thoughtful questions and really listen to people who are leaving. ### **Reflect and Improve** When your employees share wisdom in exit interviews, it's helpful to share that feedback with people who are staying. This is a time for your team to reflect on how well you handled the offboarding process. ## **Wrangle Can Help Automate Employee Offboarding** Automation tools are a secret superpower when defining an employee offboarding process. An automated offboarding process is the safest way to ensure everything runs smoothly.