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Offboarding is an essential part of the talent lifecycle and for all exiting employees, whether their exit is voluntary, mandated, or the employee is retiring. Sad to say, according to Aberdeen’s 2013 Offboarding research, only about 29% of organizations have a formal offboarding process in place. In this process, the employer has a few goals; check out what the other 71% are missing:
- Identify turnover issues
- Locate employee engagement roadblocks
- Pinpoint recruiting and onboarding strengths and weaknesses
- Gauge the exiting employee’s perception of the employer brand
- Leave the door open for quality, exiting talent
When all of the above are achieved with the company’s visions and goals in mind, that is what a strategic offboarding program looks like. Each objective is important to the big picture goals and your ability to clear the path to them. Meeting business objectives means recruiting, engaging and retaining your key talent.
Successful offboarding is crafted with these aims in sight:
As the final piece of the entire talent lifecycle that has been fostered with the right tools and practices, the good news is that there probably aren’t going to be too many shockers lurking around here. When each stage of the employee lifecycle lends itself to the others through technology and leadership, you’ve created a transparency that ends optimally.
You’ve taken great care in your employee appraisal process to uncover turnover issues, and increase retention efforts. At this point, the offboarding process will likely not present anything about this employee’s departure that you didn’t already know from your stellar performance management. If you do obtain new information about the details of their departure, a good offboarding documentation process will allow you to apply this knowledge where relevant.
With your goal alignment software, you’ve been able to identify engagement issues, and remedy them in real-time. The biggest problem with most engagement initiatives is that they are retro facing. Engagement is an issue that needs addressing today. Although you have mounds of engagement data on this employee alone, it is vital to solicit further information, in case your process can improve in any way.
One thing that your applicant tracking system and paperless onboarding platform can’t do is improve upon itself (besides stellar upgrades and automated online services). It takes a person with a passion for improving your entire talent acquisitions process. While your ATS and paperless onboarding can be set up to collect candidate and employee experience data, it is a nice personal touch to solicit this information straight from a person who has been there and done that.
It is vital to gauge the exiting employee’s perception of the employer brand for a couple of reasons. Firstly, although you have thoughtfully incorporated the solicitation of this information in your quarterly employee reviews (at least you better have!), being face-to-face with the exiting employee gives them one last chance at sharing their feedback, thoughts, frustrations, feelings and hopefully even praises. Asking about their perception of the employer brand will also help to ensure that the exiting employee feels valued. This is another opportunity to collect and build a pool of objective data to help you confidently make workforce decisions, going forward.
Lastly, this is your chance to either retain or leave an open invitation for quality, valued talent. When each step of the talent lifecycle is documented and organized, it’s not hard to identify key talent. Take this opportunity to make them feel welcomed back, and ask what can be done to make that happen.
You have all of their performance data, you have the feedback that they’ve given the organization, and now you have an exiting employee. Where did you go wrong? Where are the gaps in your processes, and at what point in the talent lifecycle are they occurring? Connecting those dots is virtually impossible without tools that work together—total integration.
The Good News
Every tool that we’ve mentioned in the talent lifecycle series are part of the ClearCompany solutions package. They are fully integrated solutions that work throughout the talent lifecycle, putting your vision and goals at the center of every stage.
I hope we’ve introduced you to a new way of looking at the employee lifecycle. One without silos, one without a disjointed process, information and goals. There is no reason to have segmented technologies for each stage of the employee lifecycle, when all of your data can be working together to facilitate optimal and effective leadership.
We would like to take you through each step of the talent lifecycle, and show you how our solutions can optimize each minute of it.
Come on, it’s demo time.
