Offboarding: Achieving goals efficiently with a concept & plan
A well-structured offboarding process not only benefits the departing employees, but also offers numerous advantages for the company. An offboarding concept and offboarding plans tailored to the respective situation are helpful tools for setting up an efficient process and benefiting from the potential of good exit management. This guide shows you what is important and gives you tips on how to develop a concept and plan.
What are the offboarding concept and offboarding plan?
What is an offboarding concept?
The offboarding concept serves as an overarching guideline for offboarding. It is not focused on individual departments or persons, but applies to the entire company. It contains all relevant aspects of exit management, both on the employee and employer side.
As a result, the offboarding concept answers all the questions that need to be answered when employees leave the company, such as
- Which documents must be completed?
- What happens to issued work materials and equipment(laptops, screens, desks, office chairs, etc.)?
- What does the professional integration look like in the remaining weeks or months?
- What access to tools and/or sensitive data?
- When are accesses withdrawn?
- How is knowledge transfer ensured?
- How is the departure communicated (internally and externally)?
- How is the replacement made?
- Which people are involved in offboarding
- usually HR, IT, accounting and specialist department
- but possibly in project work with other departments
- Who conducts the offboarding interview?
- How should contact be maintained with people after leaving the company?
What is an offboarding plan?
The offboarding plan follows on directly from the measures developed in the concept. The offboarding plan is designed for practical implementation by the people involved and specifies the generally formulated measures. As a result, the plan is a detailed list of all relevant tasks that need to be completed during offboarding. The tasks are supplemented by a time component specifying when the tasks are to be completed.
In the form of an offboarding checklist, the plan helps those involved to work through the entire process step by step in a targeted manner. All tasks can then be completed one after the other without any problems or stress. This also ensures that no task is forgotten.
Tip: Digital offboarding tools help to present the plan clearly and update the status of individual tasks with little effort. Useful reporting functions provide additional transparency and already show optimization potential for the future.
In contrast to the offboarding concept, however, there is no single plan. Instead, offboarding plans can differ in terms of content and timing, depending on the situation:
- Which position leaves the company.
- How the separation came about.
- Employee leaves the company at their own request
- Employee was dismissed
- Employee leaves the company to take retirement
- What notice period there is or how long the remaining time in the company is.
If possible, you create a corresponding plan for all scenarios and thus ensure the best possible experience.
Why are the offboarding concept and plan important at all?
When employees leave the company, this usually has far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, there is a risk that skills and knowledge will leave the company along with the colleagues. The topic of knowledge transfer should therefore play an important role in offboarding.
As a rule, employees are involved in numerous tasks and projects. A handover includes all tasks and records what needs to be taken over later and by whom. This ensures that important tasks do not get lost. At the same time, the handover is also a helpful starting aid for the induction of the successor.
Over time, employees are provided with a variety of work equipment and materials. An offboarding process is also important to ensure that all equipment (and therefore company assets and confidential information) finds its way back.
When developing the concept, offboarding is viewed holistically. This gives you an overview of the entire process and all areas involved. This gives you the opportunity to consider all aspects and the requirements of all stakeholders. This will later help you to understand which measures to focus on in the context of offboarding in order to offer a good offboarding experience.
With the help of an offboarding plan, you can reduce uncertainty among the people involved. At the same time, the plan is an easy-to-follow checklist that helps you to complete all offboarding tasks in a targeted and efficient manner, saving you a lot of time and therefore money.
How do I develop an offboarding concept? And who is responsible for it?
As with onboarding, responsibility for offboarding lies with the management. However, it is usually implemented in close cooperation with the HR department. Similar to the development of the onboarding concept, a task force can also be set up to create the offboarding concept. The task force should include colleagues from different departments and hierarchical levels. This helps to look at offboarding from different perspectives and take into account the various exit management requirements.
The concept phase should begin with an audit of the status quo.
- What does the current process look like?
- Which recurring problems are already known from the past?
- Is there already feedback from former employees?
This will give you an initial feel for which areas are not currently covered, what should be retained and where there is room for improvement.
Then talk to all stakeholders who are important for offboarding and ask about their respective requirements. These are usually the team or division leaders, office managers and the colleagues responsible for technical offboarding in the IT department.