What is an Employee Offboarding Workflow and why is it important?
An employee offboarding process outlines the specific steps to ensure an employee can seamlessly depart from your organisation.
A clearly defined employee offboarding workflow will help prevent disruption to daily operations within your organisation by ensuring the smooth transfer of expertise from the departing employee to other or new employees.
An effective employee offboarding workflow will ensure that all departing employees experience the same offboarding procedure. It will also help prevent any misunderstanding from either party occurring allowing your organisation to maintain good relations with the offboarding employee.
How to create your own Employee Offboarding Workflow
When creating your employee offboarding workflow, you first want to begin by determining the scope and outcomes you want to generate with this process.
For an employee offboarding workflow, your goal is to ensure the seamless departure of an employee from your organisation with as little disruption to daily operations as possible.
When creating a workflow, it is imperative that you have a thorough understanding of what the starting and endpoints of your process will be before continuing to outline the connecting steps.
In our free template, we choose to start our employee offboarding workflow with the informing of all staff about the impending offboarding and ended it with the sending of an email of gratitude to the departing employee.
Once you have established the beginning and endpoints, you can now determine the connecting steps.
Think about everything that needs to happen withing your organisation so that an employee can be offboarded as effectively as possible, such as the retrieval of company property or an exit interview.
Now it is time to work out who will be involved in the process. Consider all the stakeholders involved, their specific responsibilities, and the information they need to complete the task.
Based on these factors you can then determine specific roles for every step of the task and establish accountability.
In our example, we’ve used broad role names such as ‘HR’ or ‘Head of Department’, but you may wish to use role names more specific to your organisation and your departments.
Once you have finished all the planning you can now go ahead and create your workflow template.
You could design a very simple image of your workflow, but we recommend using software like Jomo247, that enables you to create and automate your workflows and ease the burden on your HR department.
Once the template has been created you can now implement your new employee offboarding workflow.
Don’t forget it is crucial to keep track of how your processes are performing in real time in case you need to apply any improvements. Continually improving your processes are essential to achieving compliance and helps ensure your processes are running optimally.
