What is Digital Offboarding?

As human resource professionals, we’re all seasoned in the implications and considerations around onboarding – the critical program that sets the tone for your employees’ relationship with your company. And today, in our ever-evolving virtual world, the demand for onboarding remotely and digitally has increased significantly.

But what about offboarding? Typically, manual offboarding has been a more traditional part of the process. Now, offboarding can be done virtually and remotely too.

All employee journeys have a beginning, middle, and end. Some employees stay for days, some for months, and many for years but all employees complete this journey.

• Beginning: Onboarding
• Middle: Crossboarding (changing roles/departments)
• End: Offboarding

While onboarding is vital, offboarding is just as important to preserving and bolstering your company’s reputation, managing your employees’ experience, and fostering the return of boomerang employees.

Well-structured offboarding can be the difference between waking up to a Twitter rant from a disgruntled terminated employee slamming your company and welcoming back a former employee when they want to return.

At Click Boarding, we’ve evolved offboarding to a new level. Our approach goes beyond traditional offboarding by simplifying the multi-step process with streamlined digitization. With digital offboarding, the manual aspects most HR teams experience have been replaced with time-saving automated workflows, proper paperwork, helpful reminders, and more.

Let’s take a deeper dive into offboarding, common missteps, and best practices:

What is digital offboarding?

Digital offboarding is the next-generation management of employee exits in a thoughtful, thorough, and consistent way. It includes all the processes and procedures involved in employee exits due to voluntary resignation, layoffs, or termination.

Why does digital offboarding matter?

Employees leave companies for many reasons and the offboarding experience is often inconsistent, lacking empathy, or simply unpleasant. Poor offboarding is kind of like telling your employees, even the great ones you hope to return someday, ‘don’t let the door hit you on the way out!’

Mismanaged offboarding opens the company up to negative word of mouth, legal risks, and a host of unnecessary business risks. 

What are common offboarding missteps?

• Inconsistent processes: Many companies leave offboarding as an afterthought and let each manager handle the process without oversight.
• Inconsistent communication: Offboarded employees want to understand what to expect. The wrong tone, incorrect information being disseminated, and limited information are common missteps.
• Remote employees: The extra hurdles of offboarding remote employees aren’t managed, including communication, access shutoff, equipment return, expectation management, and employee feelings.
• Security loopholes: Inconsistent offboarding can lead to security loopholes, both physical and digital, leaving your company vulnerable (especially to angry offboarded employees).

What are digital offboarding best practices?

• Consistent Processes: Consistent offboarding, for on-site and remote contributors, ensures each transitioning employee experiences a well-thought-out process with automated triggers for tasks such as asset retrieval and services shut off.
• Consistent Communication: Employee exits can be stressful, especially during times of mass layoffs. Consistent communication helps exiting employees understand what to expect, when, and how. It also ensures each employee receives the same messaging and information to minimize uncertainty.
• Appropriate Tone: The importance of how you make employees feel during their exit can’t be emphasized enough. Respect, empathy, and the right tone are paramount.
• Company Values: Offboarding is the lasting impression you will leave with these employees. Infusing it with your company values helps you positively color the experience.
• Exit Interviews: Learn from your exiting employees about how you can improve the employee experience.

How can Click Boarding help?

Click Boarding is the industry leader in seamless remote employee offboarding. Our mobile-first platform integrates directly with your HRIS and enables your organization to provide a compassionate, compliant offboarding experience every time.

Our platform can help you:

• Create custom, consistent offboarding experiences
• Provide clear communication over email or text, ensuring your offboarded employees get the right information at the right time
• Build customizable messaging, enabling you to manage the tone and content
• Establish an effective offboarding process that includes all relevant teams (IT, security, data management, compliance, HR, and more)

If you’d like to learn more about how offboarding can increase boomerang employees and referrals, mitigate your risk, and improve your employer brand, our team would be happy to chat.

Click Boarding introduces modern offboarding solution to simplify employee exits and improve employee experience

Click Boarding, the leading modern onboarding platform, today unveiled its offboarding module that will enable enterprise companies to provide employees with a customized and consistent exit experience while creating a more efficient, streamlined and compliant process for HR.

“People leave their company for many reasons, and oftentimes their offboarding experience is inconsistent, lacking empathy or simply unpleasant,” said Pete Olson, Chief Product Officer at Click Boarding. “Alumni employees can be a great resource for referrals, boomerang as return employees, and help bolster the employer brand, but if their offboarding is done poorly or improperly the company can be opened to negative word of mouth or even legal risks.”

Click Boarding’s intuitive, mobile-first and highly-configurable platform now powers onboarding, cross-boarding and offboarding using the same core functionality that supports multiple workflows, task management and content management, and marries employee engagement with streamlined HR administration and compliance.

“Companies can now ‘flip a switch’ to activate offboarding without the need to create a new instance or worry about data security,” said Olson. “We’ve made it easy to take advantage of the right employee-centric experience to smooth the transition and provide an ongoing communications channel.”

Key Features

• Offboarding-specific portal for the employee transition with empathetic language and tone
• Neutral third-party acts as intermediary between the employer systems and outside users (i.e. ex-employees)
• Customized email messaging to the affected employees
• Customized offboarding URL and language offers the right tone
• Ability to create and assign tasks for such things as asset retrieval and services shut off

Key Benefits

• The boomerang effect: One day some employees may want to return to the company. How the employee is treated will have a lasting impression on that decision to return.
• Referral source: The reality is a company’s ‘alumni’ network is a tremendous force for how their new candidate pipeline can be filled.
• Brand effects: Companies are global and local. How the offboarded employee speaks about their experience is telling as to whether the company adheres to their values.
• Risk Minimization: Peace of mind that necessary tasks to close security loopholes are process-generated. Additionally, Communication vehicle for HR admin to provide information to employee

About Click Boarding

Click Boarding is a modern onboarding platform that excites HR and new hires by blending great employee engagement, new hire forms and onboarding tasks into a simple, flexible and compliant solution. As companies struggle to effectively engage new employees while efficiently adhering to compliance standards, Click Boarding makes HR’s job easier by replacing disjointed and inconsistent onboarding processes with a single, secure and streamlined platform that delivers the engaging welcome new employees expect. For more information, follow us at @ClickBoardingHR, on LinkedIn or visit us at www.clickboarding.com.