What is offboarding?

Offboarding refers to the structured process of transitioning an employee out of an organisation when they exit the company. Whether an employee resigned voluntarily, was terminated involuntarily, retired, or reached the natural end of a temporary contract, a comprehensive offboarding process needs to be followed to formally separate them from their role.

Executed correctly, offboarding protects data and intellectual property, gathers insider insights, strengthens employer brand, and enables smooth business continuity through talent transitions.

Handled poorly, it leaves companies vulnerable to compliance breaches, knowledge loss, damage to culture, and lost productivity during the onboarding of replacements.

For global companies operating across multiple countries and jurisdictions, the offboarding process gets exponentially more complex. Navigating cultural nuances, differing rules around terminations, redundancies, and terminations – not to mention language barriers.

On top of that, multinational employers need to do all of this from scratch in every location where they hire. As many employers learn, laws and regulations vary dramatically across international borders – and keeping up with them as they change and evolve requires a significant time and resource investment.

There are a few main types of employee offboarding, based on the circumstances of their departure:

Involuntary offboarding occurs when employees are terminated or removed from their positions. This may be due to poor performance, company restructuring/position elimination, budget cuts, or other reasons. In these cases, extra sensitivity and care should be exercised with exiting employees to avoid compliance concerns.

Voluntary offboarding refers to when the departing team member proactively decides to resign from their job, whether due to retirement, career changes, relocations, pursuing further education, or other personal reasons. These tend to allow for more advanced notice and planning.

For temporary, contract, freelance, or fixed-term roles, offboarding often centres around project or contract transitions as employment terms come to scheduled endings.

Exceptions like the death of an employee or workplace injuries/disabilities also warrant customised offboarding considerations, grief support, and ongoing benefits.

Well-managed offboarding should accomplish four core goals:

• Knowledge transfer: Ensuring critical information and institutional know-how are passed on to appropriate team members and don’t disappear during the transition. This includes documenting processes, training successors on unique systems, and introducing key contacts to help complete priority assignments. Preserving access to their expertise benefits the company long-term.
• Asset recovery: Reclaiming company assets, equipment, access tools provided to the employee over their tenure. Creating air-tight processes for securing company phones, laptops, system logins, software devices, and credit cards reduces security risks.
• Admin completion: Finalising all financials, documentation, contracts, equity agreements, and benefit disbursements accurately, legally, and ethically. Handling this professionally helps to further reinforce a positive employer brand as former employees share offboarding experiences. As part of that, final pay summaries should be created and sent to departing employees.
• Safeguarding interests: While often established at the beginning of employment contracts, confidentiality, non-compete and IP protection agreements with evidence can sometimes be signed during the onboarding process. This ensures departing staff cannot legally threaten an organisation with sensitive intel or directly competing later on.

While every employee exit involves unique considerations, having a formalised offboarding process helps ensure consistency, compliance, and security amidst transitions. By following a standardised offboarding checklist, companies can maximise knowledge transfer, minimise business disruption, and gather insights to continually strengthen culture.

Context matters when it comes to deciding which offboarding process to follow. The way you handle a retirement is going to be vastly different to the way you handle a termination. Start by clarifying and understanding the current situation of the departing employee and be ready to adjust your strategy from there.

Notify the departing employee when their last day will be, share necessary offboarding steps, and set expectations around equipment return. Then communicate news to the wider team – frame the transition positively, while reassuring workstream continuity and offering HR support.

Document open projects, reassign workflows based on capacity and expertise, and establish succession plans. Schedule training sessions for upskilling. Enable downloading key materials from email and internal systems before system access termination. Conduct handoffs with relationship owners if client-facing.

Retrieve company property, including any company-owned equipment or access tools provided, and arrange their secure return. Confirm data and personal details are fully wiped from devices upon return. Terminate employee access credentials across all internal systems – email, servers, VPN, operational platforms, etc to close security gaps.

Make space for candid feedback on their tenure by asking open questions – why are they leaving? What could improve regarding company culture, professional growth, and leadership communication? This information can be used to improve your internal processes and policies.

Process their final paycheck accurately per local laws, including any owed time off, expenses, commissions, and benefits payouts. As part of specific offboarding procedures, close their payroll profile, provide compliant paperwork like employment confirmation letters, and gather any necessary signatures on forms. Update status in HR systems internally and with relevant external agencies.

Need more guidance? We go into all of these steps (and more) in our employee onboarding guide.

With remote work and global teams on the rise, companies increasingly need to offboard employees in distributed locations across multiple countries and jurisdictions. As you follow the general offboarding steps, also consider the following:

• Local labour laws: Extra care should be given to fully understanding labour laws in the countries where remote staff have been hired. Many nations have strict employer compliance regulations around termination notices, severance pay calculations, and paperwork filing that need to be met. Consult lawyers or HR providers operating in the countries where your remote staff are located so you can verify you are meeting all compliance regulations.
• Equipment return logistics: Arranging secure return of company property also proves more difficult with overseas employees who may have phones, laptops, proprietary tech, or other materials. Confirm return shipping costs are covered, and materials are sufficiently insured, tracked, and secured in transit internationally.
• Systems access challenges: With employees accessing internal platforms remotely, extra IT diligence is required to terminate all permissions and credentials. Virtual access poses added data leaks and IP theft risks if not handled carefully during transitions.

While offboarding processes mainly remain the same for distributed teams, giving extra attention to local employment legislation, equipment return logistics and securing access proves to be key to smooth, compliant remote employee transitions.