Offboarding Intro
[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1563570109175{margin-bottom: 15px !important;padding-top: 40px !important;}” el_class=”job_orient”][vc_column width=”2/3″ css=”.vc_custom_1563564181248{padding-right: 30px !important;}”][vc_custom_heading text=”Introduction to Offboarding: The What and Why” google_fonts=”font_family:Montserrat%3Aregular%2C700|font_style:700%20bold%20regular%3A700%3Anormal” css=”.vc_custom_1565299156234{margin-top: -8px !important;margin-bottom: 29px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1566396142741{margin-bottom: 32px !important;}”]Everyone knows that onboarding is more critical than ever given historically low unemployment rates and a tight labor market. After all, first impressions matter and you want to get each new hire off to a great start so they will stick around long enough to make a positive contribution to your company’s success.
But what about those last impressions that happen when an employee exits? Whether it’s termination, downsizing, resignation or retirement, most companies consider the loss of an employee an unfortunate thing – a challenge that has to be overcome by a new round of recruitment and hiring. The good news, if you stop and think about it for a moment, is that every employee departure is also an opportunity if you know how to make the most of it. And that is what offboarding is all about.
A Shocking Statistic About Offboarding
Businessolver is a benefits administration technology provider that includes this statistic on its website: 63% of HR professionals do not have an offboarding strategy in place. But, don’t believe it.
After a little more digging, you might find that this particular statistic has also been mentioned with the following quote: “Only a little over one in three respondents (36.5 percent) say that their organization has a documented HR strategy.” So the 63% is not about offboarding strategy, it’s about HR strategy in general. But here’s the kicker: This statistic gets quoted when talking about the state of HR strategy in corporate America, but that is also a misapplication of it.
If you trace this statistic back to its true origin, it comes from the report XpertHR HR Staffing, Costs and Structures in the Nonprofit Sector Survey(source), so it’s not even about businesses, it’s specifically about the lack of HR strategy among non-profit organizations. Besides being an object lesson in how “facts” you find on the internet can be totally wrong when taken out of context, it did lead to finding a more correct statistic specific to offboarding. As it turns out, the situation is even worse than the wrong statistic, at least according to Aberdeen Research:
Only 29% of organizations have a formal offboarding process to transition employees out of an organization.
You might be wondering why this is even important to think about. After all, your company does some kind of exit interview, right? But an exit interview is not enough, as you’ll find out as you continue reading this article. Here’s a hint given by one writer who put it this way back in 2014 (source):
One of the most vivid memories of your business will be how they were treated on exit, that is, how well were they offboarded. And if you offboard them badly, you can quickly create a vitriolic employee who won’t speak well of your business.
But maintaining your company’s reputation and brand image is only one of many reasons to pay more attention to offboarding.
The Boomerang Effect
Have you heard of boomerang employees? Those are the ones who decide to leave your company, but then at some point end up coming back. You might think this is relatively rare, or you might think it’s not such an important phenomenon. Just remember that Steve Jobs was a boomerang employee at Apple. He was forced out in 1985 but then came back in 1997 and revolutionized the technology sector.
Obviously, not every boomerang employee is going to have that kind of outsized impact on your company, but in an extremely tight labor market, can you really afford to notbe willing to consider boomerang employees? If it’s an idea that appeals to you, then formal, well-crafted offboarding needs to be a priority. It’s through good offboarding that you set up the possibility and plant the seeds of a potential boomerang back into the company for the departing employee.
The Changing Labor Market Requires Better Offboarding
Besides historically low unemployment rates that keep businesses scrambling to find and hire workers to fill open positions, a closer look into how the labor market has changed also reveals the important of better offboarding.
It wasn’t very long ago when many workers spent the majority of their professional working life at just one company. This is especially true for the Baby Boomer generation. According to the Pew Research Center, back in 2012 workers aged 55 and older had a median tenure longer than 10 years. But now all those Baby Boomers are retiring in full force, so much so that people now refer to the “silver tsunami.” Younger workers have always been more prone to job-hopping than older workers (you can’t blame Millennials for that – it’s always been that way), so between the higher resignations of younger workers and the ongoing wave of Baby Boomer retirements, companies are experiencing higher turnover rates than ever.
These changes in the labor market provide more reasons to pay attention to offboarding because when done right, offboarding paves the way for better recruiting and hiring.
Offboarding is More than an Exit Interview
If you think conducting an exit interview means you’ve got offboarding covered, think again. Make no mistake, the exit interview is a critical component of offboarding, but it’s one piece of a larger, more complex puzzle and process. When it happens, who conducts it, and what topics are covered are all critical aspects that need to be strategically considered.
For example, if one of the purposes of the exit interview is to find out what aspects of working for your company were less than satisfying, you’ll want to make sure that the employee has already received a letter of recommendation from their manager or supervisor. Without that, the departing employee won’t be comfortable to speak their mind. And if part of the issue for them was their manager or supervisor, then having that person conduct the exit interview is also not going to be helpful.
One approach for mitigating these effects is to ditch the traditional exit interview and instead go for a post-exit interview that happens several weeks or months afterthe employee has left. You’re more likely to get the unvarnished truth, if you really want to hear it. And yes, you should want to hear it in order to find out how to improve your company and make it more attractive to future employees.
Offboarding is Your Window into Turnover Insights
If your company is plagued by high rates of employee turnover, you already know exactly how painful it is. According to a cost-of-turnover study conducted by the Center for American Progress, for positions with compensation of $75,000 a year or less, the average cost to replace an employee is 20% of their annual salary. Senior and executive-level as well as other highly-paid positions have disproportionately high turnover costs, up to as much as 213% of the position’s salary.
When a company decides to tackle turnover, the first item on the agenda is typically to pinpoint where in the employee lifecycle most turnover is happening. For a lot of companies, this turns out to be early on in a new hire’s tenure, as shown by the statistics below:
- Half of all hourly workers quit their jobs within the first 120 days (source).
- As much as 20% of turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment (source).
- One out of four employees leave within the first 90 days in a new job (source).
- More than 40% of workers leave a new job within 6 months of being hired (source).
- Workplaces with subpar onboarding are twice as likely to experience turnover (source).
This naturally leads to assuming there is a strong link between turnover and onboarding, which is often confirmed by the experiences of many companies. But whether or not it applies specifically to your company should be confirmed, not just assumed. Your company can easily find out when most employees quit, just because it tends to happen early on doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the main culprit is bad or insufficient onboarding. It mightmean that, but it also might not.
The only way to truly find out what’s causing your turnover is simple: Talk to the people who are leaving as they are leaving. There’s a common term for what this is called in human resources language, which is an exit interview. For many companies, if there is an exit interview at all, it is also often the sum total of their offboarding program. If you’re doing offboarding right, however, an exit interview would be only one of a whole series of offboarding program elements. And, as previously mentioned, if the exit interview is happening before an employee has received a recommendation from the company, they’re not going to reveal the kind of negative information you need to know because they don’t want to burn bridges or risk not getting a good recommendation.
Forming a Company Alumni Network
A relatively new development in the corporate world is forming an alumni network of employees who have left, and it has quickly become one of the most important aspects of good offboarding. You want to make sure your best employees who are leaving know that their departure is not a permanent goodbye and that you look forward to a continuing relationship of some kind with them. When you put together a high-quality alumni network, it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities. They can become a key part of your recruiting strategy, build employer brand identity, and serve as ambassadors for your company by way of business referrals (where there’s no conflict of interest). And if you include those who had less-than-stellar experiences at your company, you’ll hopefully preempt any potential negative mentions or gossiping if the network has value to them. The network also naturally becomes your pool of potential boomerang employees when you need it. Let them know they’ll get priority treatment if they apply to come back.
The purpose of this page was to introduce you to the overall concept of offboarding and why it’s important to businesses of all types today. It is by no means an exhaustive presentation of all the essential elements that go into a top-shelf offboarding program. Be sure to visit the Blog page of this website to read articles on a wide variety of offboarding topics, and explore what the other pages of this site offer if you’re ready to make offboarding a priority at your company![/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Resources for Better Employee Offboarding” font_container=”tag:h4|text_align:left” google_fonts=”font_family:Montserrat%3Aregular%2C700|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal” css=”.vc_custom_1565299510538{margin-bottom: 20px !important;}”][stm_icon_box icon=”fa-icon-stm_icon_chevron_right” icon_size=”15″ icon_align=”left” icon_width=”13″ icon_color=”#ff5e14″ box_text_color=”#555555″ css=”.vc_custom_1563564922508{margin-bottom: 3px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;}” css_icon=”.vc_custom_1563564922506{padding-left: 3px !important;}”]Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing[/stm_icon_box][stm_icon_box icon=”fa-icon-stm_icon_chevron_right” icon_size=”15″ icon_align=”left” icon_width=”13″ icon_color=”#ff5e14″ box_text_color=”#555555″ css=”.vc_custom_1563564934596{margin-bottom: 3px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;}” css_icon=”.vc_custom_1563564934592{padding-left: 3px !important;}”]Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing.[/stm_icon_box][stm_icon_box icon=”fa-icon-stm_icon_chevron_right” icon_size=”15″ icon_align=”left” icon_width=”13″ icon_color=”#ff5e14″ box_text_color=”#555555″ css=”.vc_custom_1563564946807{padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;}” css_icon=”.vc_custom_1563564946805{padding-left: 3px !important;}”]Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing.[/stm_icon_box][stm_icon_box icon=”fa-icon-stm_icon_chevron_right” icon_size=”15″ icon_align=”left” icon_width=”13″ icon_color=”#ff5e14″ box_text_color=”#555555″ css=”.vc_custom_1563564959077{padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;}” css_icon=”.vc_custom_1563564959075{padding-left: 3px !important;}”]Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing.[/stm_icon_box][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_widget_sidebar sidebar_id=”default”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_id=”row_posts” el_class=”resources_row” css=”.vc_custom_1563455280603{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Resources for Better Employee Offboarding” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:center|color:%230b2431″ use_theme_fonts=”yes” el_class=”post_hd”][stm_post_list post_list_per_row=”4″ post_list_per_page=”4″ css=”.vc_custom_1564074860679{margin-top: 60px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;}”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width=”stretch_row_content_no_spaces” css=”.vc_custom_1563830816780{margin-bottom: 0px !important;padding-top: 50px !important;padding-bottom: 60px !important;background-color: #f9f9f9 !important;}” el_class=”newsletter_row”][vc_column width=”1/4″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Sign up for our Newsletter” font_container=”tag:h2|text_align:center|color:%230b2431″ use_theme_fonts=”yes” el_class=”newsltr_hd”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1566396230605{margin-top: 15px !important;margin-bottom: 15px !important;}”]
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