Beginning or leaving any position is a complicated, sometimes stressful transition—which is why successful organizations strive to create a holistic employee experience. Both on-boarding and off-boarding significantly shape employees’ experience, and impact productivity. Just as a good on-boarding experience serves as an on-ramp to success for new employees, ensuring smooth exits is essential for efficiency, and for maintaining your organizational reputation.
That’s why investing in a well-developed off-boarding process is useful not only for employees, but for the organization as a whole. A good off-boarding process allows you and departing employees to part ways on a good note, while opening up avenues for future opportunities.
Administrators equipped with asset management tools can smoothly take control of any assets in the custody of a departing employee, which means they can strategically re-assign or re-deploy pending tasks or tickets, as well as tangible or intangible assets such as PCs or software licenses. Those tools expedite administrative processes, and help ensure an error-free transition.
An asset management solution provides the following features to streamline off-boarding:
- Email alerts: Alerts are an efficient way to ensure that your off-boarding numbers are always up-to-date. A manager in customer support, for instance, can receive advance notification that a support representative will be leaving the department, so that representative’s tasks and customer issues can be transparently reassigned. An asset management system will automatically issue alerts to relevant staff members as off-boarding milestones approach, so that required actions can be taken prior to the actual departure date. This improves task allocation, and eliminates unnecessary costs that could result from off-boarding delays.
- Updated member profiles: An asset management solution allows the creation of separate member profiles to keep track of employees. Once an employee’s off-boarding details are entered, the associated member profile is automatically updated to reflect their separation from the organization. The system also highlights the assets in departing employees’ possession, to allow for their timely recovery. This helps track asset levels and minimize disruptions in HR operations.
- Track your KPIs: Manual off-boarding is time-consuming. It requires coordination to ensure assets are retrieved, reallocated, and—if needed—sent for service. These needs are closely tied to your organizational objectives and KPIs; comprehensive tracking of off-boarding stats comes in handy to objectively achieve them. An asset management solution provides you with numbers you need to keep your respective teams and HR aware of any off-boardings in progress, and the tools to help complete them smoothly.
How does employee off-boarding help improve business performance?
Having a well-structured employee exit process is key to fair and transparent off-boarding. An asset management system allows you to automate the exit process, and makes it convenient for you to gracefully let go of your employees.
According to research reported by recruitee blog, 32% of organizations have partially automated off-boarding systems, whereas only 5% have fully automated systems to better manage employee exits. Let’s have a look at some of the advantages of automating employee on-boarding:
1. Save time and cut costs
Manually handling departing employees’ assets is tedious and error-prone. By centralizing employees data in a consolidated platform, you can easily access data without having to rely on paper-based records, and simultaneously track asset custody. This reduces the chances that assets are stolen or misplaced, and saves time to boot.
Furthermore, you can precisely calculate an employee’s total working days, keeping track of the off-boarding dates and time, so you can compensate them accordingly. This allows HR to complete any needed separation processes and efficiently handle returned assets.
Without a properly designed off-boarding system, organizational data is at risk, which increases the chances of data breaches. If not properly safeguarded, your intellectual property can be sold to competitors without your knowledge or compromised through harmful online activities. Asset management software incorporates several layers of security to make sure your data is protected against theft or data breaches. For example, your departing employees cannot leave undetected with any asset (such as a laptop) containing organizational data, because the system will notify the IT team of the assets that need to be retrieved.
2. Maintain security
Without a properly designed employee off-boarding system, organizational data is at risk, which increases the chances of data breaches. If not properly safeguarded, your intellectual property can be sold to competitors without your knowledge or compromised through harmful online activities. Asset management software incorporates several layers of security to make sure your data is protected against theft or data breaches. For example, your departing employees cannot leave undetected with any asset (such as a laptop) containing organizational data, because the system will notify the IT team of the assets that need to be retrieved.
With the recent rapid growth of the mobile workforce, it is difficult to know where—or how—your assets are being used. To combat this uncertainty, a complete tracking solution can help by tracing an asset’s location and custody. In-built location tracking features such as barcodes and GPS markers can let you search for assets based on their location.
3. Retrieve and reallocate assets
One of the foremost tasks in off-boarding is retrieving the assets physically in custody of a departing employee. Inability to reclaim those assets could represent a huge financial loss. An asset management system eases this process by automatically listing the assets under the employee’s control, so that the retrieval process is smooth as possible. Once the assets have been returned and any necessary maintenance performed, their status can be changed to “Available”—which means they’ve been freed up for other uses. This is especially important for high-value IT assets like laptops. The recovered equipment can be provided to new hires without the additional cost of procuring brand-new equipment, and that re-use also reduces your e-waste footprint.
4. Minimize lost productivity
Ideally, even departing employees can remain valuable parts of your organization as they take part in meaningful work. To ensure that there are no gaps in productivity, they can start the hand-over process during their notice period. They can help analyze what kind of tools and resources will be needed by the new employees, and kick-start the procurement process. An asset management solution can be used to coordinate any new assets required, so those new hires have the resources they need right from the start. In this way, there is no productivity loss, and the organization can accurately estimate on-boarding expenses.
5. Mitigate risk and ensure compliance
Besides equipment needs, a well-thought out employee off-boarding process will let you transfer tickets and on-going projects by cross-checking unfinished tickets with a cloud-based platform. This saves you time and money.
Understanding and implementing your organization’s policies and regulations is critical to successful off-boarding. Forbes highlights how important it is to securely retrieve or purge the data from employer-owned devices, to minimize the chance that departing employees accidentally compromise that data. This can be accomplished in part by providing a checklist of steps, such as wiping company data from the devices under their control, for employees themselves to complete. Only once these procedures have been completed, the device may be marked as returned in the central asset management system to ensure transparency.
How does seamless employee off-boarding expedite business processes?
To make sure your employee off-boarding is as swift and graceful as possible, select a system that can provide complete information about an employee’s off-boarding date, assets in possession, and more. With that information, you’ll keep up to date with your off-boarding numbers, and make wise asset-handling choices. A well-planned off-boarding process reduces the burden on your HR team, and makes it simpler for your IT team to retrieve and redeploy assets, and improves the experience of departing employees.
About EZOfficeInventory
EZOfficeInventory is a leading asset tracking software. It allows you to track, maintain, and report on inventory from anywhere, at any time.
