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There’s a lot of information out there on a remote employee onboarding process. However, frequently overlooked by organisations, but just as important is what to do when a team member leaves the company. “Offboarding” is steps to take when saying goodbye to a team member.
Offboarding is a delicate process that requires a lot of communication and coordination to make sure it goes smoothly. In some ways, it’s similar to onboarding new employees, but there are a few key differences. Offboarding aims to help team members transition into their new roles successfully and is a necessary step to ensuring their work stays with the company. It allows management to reflect on what can be improved (if anything) and protects company data. Finally, it helps to cultivate a positive relationship with the departing employee in the future.
Offboarding is a process that includes steps to take before, during, and after the departure. A successful offboarding strategy should be explicit to all team members to set expectations.
Below are some steps to help you with your offboarding process
- CREATE AN INDIVIDUALISED OFFBOARDING PLAN. People have different roles and personalities. There may be some things that you “check off the list”, but make sure you acknowledge how each employee’s work impacted the company.
- CONDUCT DAILY CHECK-INS. When an employee has given their notice, they can sometimes fade into the background. Be sure to stay on top of any unfinished tasks and projects. It’s helpful to include a timeline for when you expect the worker to complete their functions-.
- SCHEDULE AN EXIT INTERVIEW. This is a critical step in the offboarding process. Exit interviews allow management to understand why a team member is leaving and are a good opportunity for the company to provide feedback and make improvements. In order to conduct an exit interview, it is important to set up clear guidelines and goals for what you want to learn from the departing team member.
- TERMINATE ACCESS ACROSS ALL INFRASTRUCTURE
- Computing – operating systems, databases, security tools, platforms, communications tools, content management platforms, etc.
- IT services – service support, information security, data backup.
- Money – financial controls
- REVOKE ACCESS TO ONLINE TOOLS AND DOCUMENTS. At collaboration superpowers, we look at our onboarding list to make sure we disable access to all company tools, shared documents, etc. You may need to change passwords.
- HAVE A VIRTUAL FAREWELL PARTY. This is a great way to show appreciation for the departing team member and to say goodbye. It can be a way of showing gratitude for the work they have done in the past, as well as giving them an opportunity to celebrate what has been achieved so far and what is yet to come. Virtual team parties are a great way of boosting morale and helping people feel more connected with each other even if they are not physically present at the event.
- SEND A GOODBYE GIFT OR CARD. Sending farewell cards is also a nice gesture to show appreciation and gratitude for the team member’s time with the company. It also helps to keep the departing employee connected to their former colleagues. A card signed by the whole team can have a lasting impact.
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Graphic design by Alfred Boland – http://bolanden.nl/ab.html
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Original transcript
Welcome to the Collaboration Superpowers podcast. My name is Lisette and I’m interviewing people and companies doing great things remotely. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. This week, I want to focus on what do we do when somebody leaves the team because inevitably, on every team, co-located or remote, people come and they go. And on the Happy Melly team, we’ve had a couple of people come and go. So we’ve developed our own exit process, or as we like to call it, the farewell process. Now just like the onboarding process, the exiting process looks different on every team. But it is good to think about what will you do when somebody leaves. What will the process look like? So today, what I want to share with you is what the Happy Melly process looks like and how we came up with that. And hopefully, it will inspire you with ideas for how you can improve your farewell process. How the Happy Melly team came up with their farewell process is that I started with just a draft of ideas, and then I presented that draft to the team. And my thinking was it’s always better to have something down on paper rather than go to the team with a blank piece of paper. So I started the process and just wrote down thoughts and a structure, and then I had the team give input to that structure, and we went further like that.
We’ve split our farewell process into two different parts, which is before the person leaves and after the person leaves. And I should mention that the farewell process is all documented in a Google doc that we keep on our Google Drive. So everyone has access to it. Everybody can comment on it. People can make suggestions for how to improve it. It’s completely open to the team.
Since I’m the remote office manager for the Happy Melly team, I usually kick the process off, and then other people join me along the way depending on who was working closely with the person that’s leaving. But the first thing that we do before the person leaves is we organize a goodbye party and a goodbye gift. So we’ll start thinking of ideas as a team and start getting the footwork going depending on when the person is leaving.
The next is a little bit less fun, which is we need to organize the handover of responsibilities. So we usually look at their work profiles which a person has already written, that they did that when they joined the team. So it’s a profile that sort of outlines what are their commitments and their responsibilities to the team. And we look at who can take over that workflow. Or if we need to hire somebody else, we can use that as a job description for the next person and hopefully hire them before the person leaves. But in any case, we start documenting responsibilities and figuring out how to hand them over to the next person.
The next thing we do before a person leaves is we host a farewell chat, which is analogous to the exit interview. And as a team, we decided that the person that’s going to host the farewell chat is the same one or two people who are doing all the interviews, all just for consistency and productivity. So on Happy Melly team, I usually take the lead in terms of organizing the farewell chat. Other people are welcome to join if they want to.
One thing to note is that we record our farewell chats for the team members that weren’t able to be part of the conversation so that everybody can hear what the person said. And in those farewell chats, we have four basic questions. And people can ask more. But in general, we decided as a team that there were four questions we wanted to ask. The first one is what things could be improved at Happy Melly and what things should be sustained and/or built on.
The second question is what did you like the most and the least about working here. The third question is what will you be gaining in your new situation that you weren’t finding here. And the fourth is what processes did you like more or less. So those are the four general questions that we asked during the conversation, and then we recorded for the team.
Now eventually, the person is going to have to go. And after they leave, we of course start with weeping and grieving. And some of us break out the whiskey for a little while, and we really mourn the loss of the person. But at some point, we have to pull ourselves together and go on. And the next thing that we do after a person leaves is that we go through our onboarding Trello Board and we unboard the person. So essentially, when we hire a person, we go through a whole process, and we have each step documented on a Trello Board. And when the person leaves, we basically go through that Trello Board backwards. We remote them from all the social media accounts and the Google Drive and the Slack. And we just go through each thing and make sure that we have covered all the bases.
And then the last thing that we do is that as a team, we host a retrospective to talk about it. So people will have watched the interview by then. And then just as a team, we can process that person leaving together.
Okay, so that’s it. That is the Happy Melly farewell process that we use for people who are leaving the team. I hope you found the information valuable. And if you want to share your farewell process with me, please do. I would love to hear about it. You can find all the contact information at collaborationsuperpowers.com. Stay tuned next week when I speak with Patrick Linton. He is the co-founder and CEO at Bolton Remote which is a company that outsources talent in the Philippines. I’m really learning a lot about outsourcing. It’s very interesting.
A big thanks to the awesome Nick, the Podcast Monster who makes this podcast sound so pro. You can hire him to make you a star at podcastmonster.com. And another thanks to the dazzling Alfred Boland who is the graphic designer for Collaboration Superpowers. You can hire him to make you look cool at bolanden.nl. All right, everybody. Until next week, spend a little time thinking about your farewell process and be powerful.
