Offboarding: Making the Most of a Valued Employee’s Departure

We’d all like to keep our top performers around, retaining their experience and knowledge and saving the cost of recruiting, hiring, and training their replacements. Unfortunately, despite our best retention efforts, people are going to change companies, and you’ll find yourself offboarding people you worked so hard to onboard and keep.

The job-hopping trend is especially prevalent in younger workers. Research by Zippia indicates that the average worker under 24 has had almost four times as many job changes as the average worker over 45 years old.

It can be tempting to take a “Let’s get this over with and move on” approach when an employee takes a job with another company. After all, why invest more than minimal time and effort in an employee who won’t be around much longer anyway?

That, however, is a mistake for several reasons. A cold, perfunctory offboarding process can not only damage the chances of a former employee speaking well of your company, but cause you to miss out on potential internal improvements as well.

For more on effective HR strategies, check out Managing Human Resources

Conducting a proper offboarding process is a lot of work; company assets must be recovered and access privileges removed, with the final exit interview perhaps being the most important aspect. it also presents a significant opportunity if you approach it with that mindset.

How can you make offboarding a net positive for your company?

These four things are key:

1. It’s important to give the departing employee your best wishes – and mean them. It can be tempting to take the departure personally, especially if the employee has been with you for some time or is in a key position. Don’t bring resentment or anger into the offboarding process. You want the last impression of your company to be a good one, especially in light of the impact that workplace-rating sites such as Glassdoor can have on recruiting and retention efforts.
2. Leaving a good final impression keeps the door open. According to a recent UKG survey, more than 40 percent of pandemic-era job leavers discovered that they had it better at their previous companies. Maintaining good relations with a former employee can allow you to capitalize on that “boomerang” effect, if they discover that the new job isn’t working out for them.
3. Offboarding gives you a chance to find out why people are leaving. Is your compensation package below the market rate? Do other companies offer more varied career paths? A comprehensive exit interview can help you know if your company is coming up short in a way that’s fixable.
4. Conversely, if the departing employee has been happy with your company but is leaving for a dream position that you can’t offer, take that as a good sign. You’ve played a role in developing their skills, knowledge and experience, making them into an employee another company can’t help but snap up. And because of that, if you’re supportive of the move, your former employee – and their new employer – have reasons to steer people looking for that kind of career development to you.

It's not easy to say goodbye to good people. But with a solid offboarding process, you just might find yourself saying “Hello” to new opportunities, new talent, and perhaps some familiar faces down the road.

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