How the Offboarding Process Can Be Made Less Painful With Workflow

The employee journey begins with an acceptance of a job offer, begins in earnest through onboarding and lasts all the way to the exit interview. However, when an employee has decided to move on to a new position, the process of offboarding is often not given enough thought by employers and problems can arise from this.

But by leveraging the power of workflow automation, organizations can make the offboarding process just as seamless and streamlined for employees as any other ‘on-the-job’ experience.

The Hardest Part of the Job

Much like onboarding, offboarding is also moving into the arena of ‘must-have’ when it comes to business processes and talent management. You may assume that because an employee is moving on or being let go that the offboarding process isn’t as important, but there are reasons why it can affect your organization.

These include:

• Ex-employees can come back – Burning bridges is rarely a good thing. Sometimes your best talent can come back. It’s important to leave the door open.
• Data security – When an employee leaves your organization you need a process in place to make sure their access to your IT system is removed.
• Honest feedback – Understanding an employee’s experience working for you can help you improve the way you do certain things or suggest tweaks to internal processes.
• Brand ambassadors are not only current employees – Your organization’s reputation is displayed by employees and ex-employees who will have good or bad things to say about their time with you.
• Social media – You don’t want to go viral for the wrong reasons.
• Knowledge retention – Ex-employees hold a lot of experience and ‘know-how’ in their position, a smooth offboarding process will include a process for ensuring they don’t leave with all that information without sharing.

There is a good reason for a healthy and productive offboarding process and it should be taken as an important aspect of your employee lifecycle.

What you need to do is create a detailed offboarding strategy. This should include:

• An offboarding checklist for HR
• An offboarding checklist for the employee
• Review of nondisclosure agreements
• Inventory items
• A handover process (if appropriate)
• An exit interview

Each one of these points on the offboarding strategy contains several tasks and can range in complexity and involve stakeholders from across your organization. There will be processes here that are currently carried out manually, some of which can fall through the gaps and some that will not be viewed as all that important by certain stakeholders.

This can all cause delays and mistakes leading to a poor offboarding process. So, you need workflow automation to tie these processes together, automating and ensuring that other tasks are prioritized correctly.

An Automated Offboarding Workflow in Practice

• Once an employee has issued their resignation or submitted their notice, a workflow could be triggered.
• An automated email will be sent to the employee from the relevant manager acknowledging their resignation, their notice period and thanking them for their time with the company.
• The ‘offboarding process list’ is then updated with the resignation email and documents – stored automatically in the system (i.e. SharePoint, for example).
• Once the documents are stored, a notification is automatically sent to the IT team to reduce the employee’s access on the company’s system – usernames, temporary passwords, etc. are to be removed at the end of the notice period.
• When the IT task is completed, the list is updated and a notification is sent back to the HR manager and on to the Finance Department.
• The Finance Department analyzes the final payment due to the employee, considering vacation time, gardening leave, or any other relevant information. It also sets a reminder to remove the employee from Payroll once the notice period has been served. Once complete, a notification is sent to the line manager.
• The workflow then creates a ‘final weeks’’ schedule for the leaving employee:
  • A handover process, if appropriate
  • Goodbye from all the team (office cake, informal gathering, etc.)
  • Exit interview
• The ex-employee’s physical office location/workstation is then formally updated as being ‘free’.

Nintex Helps Focus on the Right Results

Nintex Workflow provides technology that is designed to reduce and alleviate the paper processes that exist in the lifecycle of an employee. For example, 80% of HR professionals say most onboarding paperwork is still completed in person. And if that’s the case, you can imagine that the reach of paper processes extends all the way to the end of an employee’s term in a job too.

Nintex Workflow takes the manual paper-based processes and simplifies, digitizes and automates, so HR can concentrate on other higher-value aspects of the offboarding process. Our solutions enable your organization to put together a formal offboarding program that is easy to manage, eliminates ad-hoc processes, delays, and scheduling conflicts and provides mobile access, further speeding up the process.

Don’t take your offboarding duties for granted. Without a strong and efficient process, saying goodbye to a quality employee can be even more painful than it needs to be.

 

To find out more about Nintex and how we can help your business, get in touch with us today.