How you farewell an employee is just as important as how you welcome them. So why do so few organisations have strategic offboarding processes in place?

Arrivals are often full of promise, while departures can be bittersweet. So maybe it’s no surprise that we’ve seen organisations invest heavily in onboarding, especially in the era of remote work – the luxurious welcome boxes, the celebratory posts, the thoughtful processes designed to equip and excite new starters. 

Contrast this with the typical offboarding processes, which are often perfunctory at best and dismissive at worst. It might be human nature, but Shelley Johnson, HR specialist and founder of Boldside Consulting, says it’s also because employers don’t see offboarding as valuable.

“We need to learn from other industries and see offboarding as a win-back strategy, a chance to create ambassadors. That’s a very different lens to what most organisations are doing currently,” says Johnson.

Similarly, culture expert Shane Michael Hatton says leaders are missing the connection between these types of processes and overall culture.

“A lot of leaders spend a lot of time asking themselves why people leave, and probably not enough time considering how people leave,” says Hatton.

Neither Hatton nor Johnson think most organisations have truly nailed offboarding; not even those who excel at onboarding and succession planning. But in the midst of a war for talent, continuing to sideline offboarding could cause serious risks to emerge. 

“When you’ve got behaviours in an offboarding process that undermine your organisation’s values and aspirations, it can create poor experiences and damage your brand – internally and externally,” says Hatton.

The flip side is ample opportunity for innovative organisations to rethink the talent lifecycle and differentiate their brand as a career partner of choice.

Building your brand in a competitive market

It’s no secret that we’re in a candidate’s market. SEEK data shows that, as of June 2022, job ads per application continue to drop each month. This is almost certain to shift – eventually – but Johnson and Hatton both warn that the current offboarding status quo still creates recruitment risks.

One reason is that word of mouth has changed forever. Hatton points to new forms of interconnectedness, citing examples of brands going viral after unethical or insensitive dismissal practices.

“We don’t only talk to people we personally know anymore. When people talk to strangers on the internet and tell the story of their experience in a business, it will shape how other people see that brand,” he says.

It’s not just the risk of negative reactions from the public that HR should be concerned with. It also means you have an absence of proactive ambassadors for your business.

“Regardless of the job market, people are more inclined to listen to the advice of a previous employee or someone they know than to simply put their hat in a ring for a job or business they know nothing about,” says Johnson. “You can either create a brand ambassador or someone who’s out there talking about their awful experience – which happens a lot.”

Johnson and Hatton point to ‘boomerang employees’ – those who return to a company after a departure – as an extension of a company’s recruitment strategy. 

“We need to learn from other industries and see offboarding as a win-back strategy, a chance to create ambassadors.” – Shelley Johnson, HR specialist and founder, Boldside HR

“Burning bridges doesn’t just risk limiting your talent pool,” says Johnson. “It’s also potentially losing out on great [returning] talent – an employee with all this historical knowledge.”

Plus, people’s last impression of their employer matters. Hatton references research cited in the book The Power of Moments, by Chip Heath, which found that we’re more likely to evaluate our experience based on key moments like an end or beginning.

“Even if someone has had a really great employment experience, a horrible offboarding experience might make them evaluate their overall experience much more harshly.”

Download HRM’s offboarding checklist.

Protecting your cultural values

While talent acquisition is an urgent priority for many organisations, Hatton says there are potential impacts to culture and retention efforts too – it’s not just prospective employees who pay attention to how you treat an exiting employee. 

“Everyone’s working towards creating your organisational culture. But the moment they start to see leaders or organisations undermining that work, they go, ‘Well, why bother?’ And people then give up.”

When it comes to culture, Hatton distinguishes between the average and the aspirational. Most culture is an average of how things are done in an organisation. Even if a culture is aspirational, employees need to see movement and behaviours that align with it. Otherwise, “the average stays the average”.

“For example, we might have an aspiration as a business to value people. But if our offboarding behaviour undermines that value, it impacts our culture and engenders apathy.”

In Johnson’s view, addressing this requires a fundamental shift in how we view the employer-employee relationship; one that moves from transactional to relational.

Investing in potential, not retention

The employee you’re investing in right now will eventually leave the business. If that sounds fatalistic, it shouldn’t. 

Even before the Great Resignation, Australians’ tenure with one employer was shrinking, reaching an average of roughly three years in 2022, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Johnson says many employers’ mindsets haven’t quite kept pace with this new climate. 

“It can be hard as an employer, and it does hurt to lose a good employee,” she says. “But only focusing on trying to keep them creates stakes that are too high. Acknowledging upfront that they’re going to leave can help you build that exit strategy into your very first interaction.

“When employers say, ‘We want to help you get to your end goal and we also want to achieve these outcomes as a business, so how can we do that together?’, it becomes more of a partnership and less transactional. There’s value on both sides.”

Hatton holds a similar view, saying that mindsets should shift from “How do we keep people?” to “How do we invest in potential?” 

“Organisations such as LinkedIn embed this mobility into their culture. They invest in the offboarding experience from the moment a person joins the business, and constantly invest in the person’s success and long-term career,” says Hatton. 

“It’s upskilling and investing in their potential, but it’s also showing that you value your connection with them even after they leave.

“In doing so, you create an opportunity for people to become advocates when they leave.”

How to offboard the right way

We don’t yet have data on blanket solutions for offboarding in a highly dispersed and mobile workforce. However, both Johnson and Hatton say there are starting points that can help organisations seize new opportunities and mitigate brand risks. 

Nailing the fundamentals is crucial. This means carving out time for conversations with departing employees, and Hatton stresses the importance of collaborating with the employee around how to communicate their exit — especially if it’s not voluntary. 

Even just ensuring leavers aren’t organising their own farewells can make a huge difference, says Johnson. 

But employers will have to move beyond the basics. Hatton and Johnson suggest rethinking HR metrics like whether an exit interview was completed. Instead, employers should be looking to demonstrate that they’ve extracted actionable takeaways from the interviews and can foster safe environments for honest debriefs. This can turn ‘tick and flick’ exit interviews into genuine opportunities for employees to reflect and for employers to learn.

Employers can also find ways to acknowledge and celebrate specific contributions, helping employees feel confident that their impacts were seen and understood. 

Some brands take this a step further by continuing to celebrate alumni’s post-employment successes through channels such as internal newsletters or social posts. This shows existing employees that the company is invested in their entire career, not just their time in that specific organisation. 

Lastly, Johnson urges HR leaders to think about team structure and purpose. While a tight market might necessitate a focus on talent acquisition in the short term, long-term visions should put greater weight on talent management and facilitate deeper consideration for the entire talent lifecycle. 

“It’s about closing the loop,” she says.

“It’s finding ways to turn a fire exit into a revolving door where people can come back and refer other people to the business.”

This article first appeared in the November 2022 edition of HRM magazine.

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