Employee Voice is Crucial During Offboarding

Offboarding is the process of transitioning a departing employee when they leave a company. It involves a series of steps to ensure that they leave on good terms and all loose ends are tied up. Offboarding is more than just compliance; it's an opportunity to capture valuable feedback, maintain positive relationships and protect your employer brand. New hires receive a lot of attention and support from organizations, while employees who leave are often neglected. They may get a brief exit interview, some guidance on how to wrap up their work, and a basic overview of what benefits and resources they can access after they leave. But that's usually all.

This is a big missed opportunity especially when your ex-employees outnumber your current employees.

In this blog post, we'll explore the importance of a solid offboarding experience, why employee voice is crucial and how to turn ex-employees into brand ambassadors.

Why is it important to have a good employee offboarding experience?

Departing a company can be hard, but it doesn't have to be messy. Ensuring a good offboarding experience is a win-win for you and the employee in many ways.

Here are some of the reasons why offboarding matters:

• Knowledge management: Knowledge management is important in any scenario, and even more so when an employee with valuable knowledge and experience is preparing to leave the company. Offboarding allows employers to capture institutional knowledge from departing employees and transfer it to their successors or colleagues. This can prevent knowledge gaps and productivity losses.

• Employer reputation: Even when an employee chooses to leave the company, their overall impression of their experience is important. While these employees are moving on, they still might recommend friends or family to the company if they see their time at the company as positive overall. Word of mouth spreads quickly, and offboarding is a chance to give people something positive to say about how their time ended. Peak-end rule states that people judge experiences on how they felt at the peak and the end. Giving your employees a chance to share constructive feedback internally versus public review sites will impact your reputation.

• Returning employees: Once an employee leaves an organization, that doesn’t mean that the professional relationship is over. 76% of HR professionals report that they’re more willing to rehire boomerang employees now than in the past. In much the same way, around 4% of former employees say they would consider returning to a job they’ve worked in the past. A successful offboarding program can increase the chances for employers to rehire former employees who have gained new skills and experiences elsewhere. These employees may come back as employees, consultants, vendors or even customers.

What are the 3 most important aspects of successful employee offboarding?

A successful employee offboarding process should include three main aspects: Communication is key throughout the offboarding process. Employees should be informed of their departure date, their responsibilities, their benefits, and their rights in a clear and timely manner. Managers should also communicate with the remaining team members about the departure and how it will affect their workloads and roles. Communication should be respectful, transparent, consistent and 2 way. Employee Voice is a valuable source of information for employers who want to improve their employee experience, retention and overall business. However, it's often neglected or ignored during the exit process, whether employees leave voluntarily or involuntarily. This is a missed opportunity for you and the employee, as well as the future of the organization. Offboarding provides a unique opportunity to collect candid feedback from departing employees about their reasons for leaving, their satisfaction with their job, their relationship with their manager and team and their suggestions for improvement. Exit interviews are a common way of gathering feedback and they can be supplemented with surveys or focus groups. Recognition is a way of showing appreciation and gratitude for the employee's contributions and achievements during their time at the company. Recognition can boost morale, loyalty and engagement among both departing and remaining employees. Recognition can take many forms, such as thank-you notes, farewell parties, testimonials, awards or gifts.

How to turn ex-employees into brand ambassadors?

Brand ambassadors are people who promote and advocate for a brand or organization through positive word-of-mouth or online reviews. Ex-employees can be powerful brand ambassadors if they leave with a positive impression of the company and maintain a good relationship with it after their departure. Here are some ways to turn ex-employees into brand ambassadors:

• Alumni network: An alumni network is a platform that connects former employees with each other and with the company. It can help ex-employees stay in touch, share news and updates, access career opportunities, and receive exclusive benefits or discounts from the company. An alumni network can also help employers keep track of their former talent pool and reach out to them for referrals, rehiring, or collaboration.

• Boomerang program: A boomerang program is a strategy that encourages former employees to return to the company after working elsewhere for some time. It can help employers save time and money on recruitment and training, as well as benefit from the new skills and experiences that ex-employees have acquired elsewhere. A boomerang program can involve sending regular newsletters, invitations, or offers to former employees, as well as creating a positive and welcoming culture for them to come back to.

• Brand ambassador program: A brand ambassador program is a formal way of rewarding and incentivizing former employees to promote and recommend the company to their networks. It can involve providing ex-employees with free products, services, or discounts, as well as recognition, rewards, or commissions for generating leads, referrals, or sales for the company. A brand ambassador program can help employers increase their brand awareness, reputation, and reach among potential customers, partners, or employees.

How ex-employees can impact your online reputation?

Online reputation is the perception that people have of a brand or organization based on what they see or read online. Online reputation can influence consumer behavior, business performance and talent attraction. Ex-employees can impact your online reputation in both positive and negative ways, depending on how they talk about their experience at your company. Here are some examples of how ex-employees can impact your online reputation:

• Online reviews: Online reviews are ratings and comments that people leave on platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Fishbowl or Google about their experience with a company. Online reviews can affect your employer brand, as potential employees often check them before applying for a job. Ex-employees can leave positive or negative reviews about your company, depending on how satisfied they were with their job and how they were treated during their offboarding process.

• Social media: Social media is a channel that people use to share their opinions, experiences, and recommendations with their friends, followers, or the public. Social media can affect your corporate brand, as potential customers often check it before buying a product or service. Ex-employees can post positive or negative messages about your company on social media, depending on how loyal they feel to your brand and how they perceive your values and culture.

• Blogs and podcasts: Blogs and podcasts are forms of content that people create and consume online to learn, entertain, or inspire themselves or others. Blogs and podcasts can affect your thought leadership, as potential partners or investors often check them before collaborating with you. Ex-employees can write or speak positively or negatively about your company on blogs or podcasts, depending on how knowledgeable they are about your industry and how they value your expertise and innovation.

How offboarding employees is more than just compliance?

Compliance is an important aspect of offboarding employees, as it involves fulfilling the legal and contractual obligations. However, offboarding employees is more than just compliance; it's also an opportunity to create a lasting impression on the employee and to strengthen the relationship. Offboarding employees with care and respect will help achieve the following benefits:

• Retain corporate memory: Corporate memory is the collective knowledge and experience that employees have accumulated over time at the company. Corporate memory can be lost when employees leave the company without transferring their insights and skills to their successors or colleagues. Offboarding employees with care and respect can help employers retain corporate memory by encouraging departing employees to share their best practices, lessons learned, tips and tricks, contacts and networks and feedback and suggestions with the company.

• Prevent turnover contagion: Turnover contagion is the phenomenon where one employee's departure triggers a chain reaction of other employees leaving the company. Turnover contagion can happen when employees perceive that their colleague's departure is a sign of dissatisfaction, instability, or lack of opportunity at the company. Offboarding employees with care and respect can help employers prevent turnover contagion by communicating the reasons for the departure clearly and honestly, addressing any concerns or rumors among the remaining employees and providing support and recognition to them. Understanding why employees leave is important to help prevent turnover contagion. Ensuring your employees still have an opportunity to share their voice as they exit is key but it doesn't stop there. The need to analyze the information, share it with senior leaders and act on it will put you in a much better position with regards to retention.
• Enhance employer brand: Employer brand is the reputation that a company has as an employer among current, former, and potential employees. Employer brand can influence employee attraction, retention, and engagement. Offboarding employees with care and respect can help employers enhance their employer brand by creating positive word-of-mouth among former employees who can recommend the company to their networks or return to the company in the future.

Conclusion

Employee voice is crucial during offboarding because it allows employers to capture valuable feedback from departing employees that can help improve employee experience, retention and overall business performance. Employee voice also allows you to maintain positive relationships with former employees who can become brand ambassadors for the company in the future. Experiences create lifelong memories that can be positive or negative.

Ensuring you create a positive exit experience for your employees is pivotal as you'll have more employees on the outside of your company than inside...and they can either be advocates or detractors.

How can you leave a positive lasting impression when an employee leaves your company? Nicole Vaughan, CEO & Founder of myCandr