When talking about employee retention, a good onboarding process is often brought up in the conversation. You want your new hire to feel welcomed and excited on their first day, with everything ready and waiting for them. Unfortunately, all this hospitality goes out the window when it’s time for them to leave.
Losing an employee is hard, and too many employers say goodbye without a real offboarding process in place. Rather than give them the cold shoulder, here are best practices in the offboarding process that can boost retention.
Say goodbye in the proper way
What this means is to treat them kindly throughout the process and celebrate their successes. Instead of being bitter that they’re leaving, you can be sad to lose them and still show you appreciate all they contributed during their time with you.
Because employees will leave for several different reasons, exactly how you say goodbye will differ, but always keep kindness and compassion at the forefront. You can’t control their leaving or their actions leading to their dismissal, but you can manage your response.
Do an exit interview
Letting an employee leave without gaining some insight is a huge mistake. This is the employee’s opportunity to express their frustrations, concerns, and happy points. In turn, their feelings can help you improve the company culture moving forward. This continual improvement will help you retain employees in the long run because your goal is to make it a better work environment.
Develop a checklist for offboarding
The goal of all of this work is for the employee to leave on good terms and minimize the risk of their retaliation against your business. Even so, sometimes, it can still turn sour, and you want to protect your data, systems, and people. A checklist for each level and department can make sure the proper accounts are deleted, and accesses denied to discourage something catastrophic to your company from happening. With a checklist, you’ll know every step is taken, and nothing is overlooked.
Ease the transition
In many staffing cases, you won’t have a new employee in place before your current employee is gone, meaning the overlap is minimal. As a result, you have an employee coming in with little idea of what needs to be done if their predecessor didn’t leave the right information. With your offboarding process, you can make the responsibilities and instruction write up part of leaving.
Partner with Gem Care
We can’t keep your employees from leaving, but we can fill your manufacturing, skilled trade, clerical, engineering, and administrative staffing needs. Our talent bench is deep with the help you need on-demand so that you won’t feel a drop in your productivity. Begin by requesting an employee to learn how we can help you!
