3 Reasons Good Offboarding Matters to Your Business

Though offboarding isn’t always a favorite task, it is a crucial one -- in fact, it’s just as important as onboarding. Good offboarding that’s accurate, effective, and time efficient can have expansive positive effects on your business. In this article, we’ll take a look at 3 reasons well-executed offboarding is valuable for you and your employees.

1. Manage Your Employer Brand

As the final touchpoint with your organization, offboarding can set the tone for how employees remember their time working with you. A negative offboarding experience can leave employees with a bad taste in their mouths. And today, accounts of negative work experiences spread quickly through social media and websites like Glassdoor.

Bad word of mouth can have a real impact on your employer brand, which in turn can harm your recruiting and retention efforts. However, a positive reputation is just as powerful, and leaving your employee with a good last experience can help promote your brand as a great employer.

2. Increase the Chance of Rehiring

In addition to maximizing your recruiting and retention rates, good offboarding can be especially valuable if you’d like an employee to work for you again in the future. Providing a positive experience for exiting employees increases the chance that they’ll want to return. Rehiring a previous employee can mean faster onboarding and lower acquisition costs. And rehiring can be particularly cost and time effective if your workforce is seasonal.

3. Empower HR to be More Efficient

A well-executed offboarding process helps your HR teams work faster and more efficiently. And automation saves HR time and resources by eliminating repetitive tasks so that HR can focus on value-add activities, such as exit interviews, updating the offboarding process, or supporting your employer brand. Automation also helps ensure that all the steps of your offboarding process are completed -- such as revoking email access or access to physical locations --  thereby reducing errors that can occur if processes are completely manual. This can be particularly valuable if you need to account for variations in the offboarding process based on an employee’s role and location. And personalized automation can help ensure that all required paperwork is completed and filed, while supporting document retention schedules set by company policy or local regulation.

There are lots of ways to execute good offboarding and provide employees with a positive experience. Lending transparency into the process and providing employees with personalized resources about policy, joining your alumni network, or available outplacement services can help them feel supported in their next steps. Helping employees navigate their exit, while reducing the amount of manual work for HR, can boost your reputation as a great employer while having a direct and positive impact on your business.