Employee Offboarding

At first, I hated the terms "on-boarding" and "off-boarding" (yes, I heard them both at the same time), but I came to appreciate them the more varied the workforces I encountered. It's helpful to have a collective term for all the ways people join or leave your organization's shadow when you deal with employees, workers, consultants, contractors, temps, volunteers, secondments, embedded workers and the various permutations of the modern economy of work.

Now, to the question.

Well, the first piece of advice may come across as stating the obvious, but it's surprising how often I've had to repeat it to senior leaders:

1. If you want good relations with your ex-employees, have good relations with your current ones. Because they are the ones who will eventually be ex-employees.

2. When someone decides to leave, don't take it personally. Even when it's personal. Treat every leaver with courtesy, respect and fairness. Even if they are leaving under a cloud or after a falling out, they will appreciate professional dealing and remember it long after the bitterness has faded.

3. When someone leaves "in good standing", ask them to join your alumni (or whatever) contact group. This should follow the normal rules for GDPR, but it's good to stay in touch with such people, a couple of times a year. A personal email asking after their success, and letting them know if any interesting vacancies might be opening up in your business for them to return, won't go amiss. Birthday and Christmas cards will be appreciated.

4. Keep good records. Remember: even the people who look after the almuni contact group may be ex-employees eventually, so you'll need to make sure you retain the names, details and stories of all those employees in a database.

5. Let the bad stuff be forgotten. If someone left under a cloud or had a falling out four, five, six or more years ago, there should come a point at which you're prepared to let bygones be bygones and to assume that, just maybe, they have moved on and so should you. And at that point, you may like to reach out again and see where they're at.

Hope that helps.

This is a really important point made by Robey: "When someone decides to leave, don't take it personally. Even when it's personal. Treat every leaver with courtesy, respect and fairness."

Many managers turn really great leavers into bad ones just by the way they respond to a resignation.

Take time to invite the leaver to an informal and confidential exit interview and let them know how much their contributions and opinions are valued by the firm. You can learn a lot from these meetings because you will never hear a more honest opinion of the business than from a departing employee with nothing left to lose!

Sincerely wish them well and let them know the door remains open to them in the future.

This is a really important point made by Robey: "When someone decides to leave, don't take it personally. Even when it's personal. Treat every leaver with courtesy, respect and fairness."

Many managers turn really great leavers into bad ones just by the way they respond to a resignation.

Take time to invite the leaver to an informal and confidential exit interview and let them know how much their contributions and opinions are valued by the firm. You can learn a lot from these meetings because you will never hear a more honest opinion of the business than from a departing employee with nothing left to lose!

Sincerely wish them well and let them know the door remains open to them in the future.