They quit, now what? 5 tips for digitally offboarding employees safely.

They quit, now what? 5 tips for digitally offboarding employees safely.

Having an employee quit can be very disruptive to your business, besides having to scramble to rehire for the role or find coverage within your organization you also have to tie up any loose ends they may have been working on (especially if they left without a hand off period).

Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to wait until the dust has settled, when it comes to tying up loose ends we recommend jumping into action immediately once you’ve been made aware that your employee will not be continuing in their role.

We’ve touched on what you should do if your IT guy quits here but many of your non-IT employees also leave a strong digital footprint within your business that will need to be dealt with when they leave.

Here are the five things we suggest doing immediately on your former employees last day:

  1. First, identify all of the company programs or platforms that they have logins or passwords for. Even during an amicable split, it’s still a good idea to change these passwords in the same way a landlord might update the locks between tenants if they weren’t absolutely sure they recovered all the keys to the building (and since we’re talking digital, there’s no way to be sure).
  2. You also need to change their email password. You might be thinking you should just delete their email but depending on the role they performed for your business there may be pertinent information that’s only found within their work email. We also suggest forwarding emails that come to that employee to whoever is handling their work activities until you’re sure that every client or vendor that worked with them has gotten the message about who to contact instead.
  3. Recover any work devices if applicable. In some cases it may be suitable to just have your IT team wipe the device or remove company data if you’re not interested in passing it along to their replacement (especially for older devices).
  4. In the same vein, if there is relevant company data on their devices it may be worthwhile to have your IT team recover it if possible. While we recommend collaborating with your employees through something like a company SharePoint or another unified platform, anything that was currently in flux before they quit may still be worth recovering.
  5. The final steps are related to physical office security as well, you’ll want to disable their badges and network privileges upon their exit.

At Valley Techlogic we like to create resources for our community, and while many steps in the offboarding process aren’t strictly digital we thought it would be helpful to provide an offboarding checklist that can be used to make sure you’re covering not only steps outlined above but also all aspects of the offboarding process (with a clear view on what’s digital and what’s not). Need help branding it? Just let us know.

Click to grab the full size version.

If you need assistance in creating a thorough offboarding process for your business, or even an onboarding process that includes coverage for making future offboarding easier, we can help.

We’re experts in creating specialized processes for our clients so that all aspects of the technology they use are secured and maintained, including devices and platforms used by employees.

Schedule a consultation with us today to learn more about how we can assist you with your digital employee planning and maintenance.

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This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.