The implementation of an offboarding policy, systematizing and perpetuating good practices, enables managers and their teams to achieve lasting productivity gains. The manager is freed from his "mental load", and the whole team gains in productivity.
The company has many different employee segments. There are those on permanent contracts, those on fixed-term contracts, trainees and even freelancers, whose share of the company's workforce is growing year on year. Of course, each segment has its own profile and behavior patterns, and offboarding must be adapted accordingly.
What makes them different? For example, their short/medium/long-term outlook, or their openness to the use of digital tools. Whether you're an HR manager or an operational manager, it's essential to understand these differences.
Implementing a new corporate policy always raises the question of its scope: offboarding is no exception!
The principle that"interns don't cost much, so we don't invest in them" is still alive and well in organizations. However, it's with this population that we need to start addressing "a new way to say goodbye" to the company's employees.
Internship and work-study cycles come and go. Each time a new employee arrives, he or she has to be trained, before being told 6 months later how to "tidy his or her room" before leaving the company (e.g. sorting out the Google Drive, writing up documentation with past/ongoing projects, or writing a farewell email to customers/suppliers).
When it comes to offboarding, there's little literature, and managers often lack the method and motivation to prepare for an employee's departure. With each cycle, the manager loses a considerable amount of time offboarding the outgoing employee, then onboarding the incoming one.
The implementation of an offboarding policy, systematizing and perpetuating good practices, enables managers and their teams to achieve lasting productivity gains. The manager is freed from his "mental load", and the whole team gains in productivity.
Here's a good reason to implement an offboarding policy, starting with a pilot on students!
When you're a manager, you may know that your average turnover rate is 12%, but you have no control over when your employees will actually leave the company. For example, the date of a resignation is not predictable, or at least not precisely.
For interns and work-study students, it's easy to plan offboarding tasks 4 to 6 weeks before the employee's departure (preparing a handover, communicating internally or externally the forthcoming departure, preparing the list of accesses to tools to be removed on D-day...). Another good reason to prioritize offboarding with interns and work-study students!
Generation Z is a generation of enterprising employees. As they are in their personal lives, so they are in the workplace.
Their relationship to work and authority has radically evolved compared to that of generations X and Y. This translates into a desire to be involved in managerial decision-making or to understand the meaning of actions taken, but also to be recognized for their work and the results obtained.
Offboarding, and in particular the creation of a transfer of knowledge facilitated by a method or tool, is an excellent way of enhancing the value of a "future ex-trainee/alternate". Several forms of recognition can be accorded: the company may finance part of an event (such as a "farewell party"), the manager may recommend the employee on Linkedin, or the employee may be offered a letter of recommendation.
Of course, recognition expressed within the team and verbally is also essential, but this mark of recognition "doesn't go beyond the walls of the company".
Sometimes, a resigning employee may not wish to "share his expertise" with his successor or future ex-employer. This is sometimes the result of a relationship that has deteriorated over time. On the other hand, the student is more likely to go along with the manager, in particular so that he/she is favorable to him/her in his/her internship/ternship report, not to mention their potential wish to be recruited by the company. Here again, +1 point for student offboarding.
In 2020, while good practices in terms of onboarding are commonplace in startups and large companies alike, offboarding is still little addressed, as only 8% of companies say they support their employees' departure, according to a 2018 Hays Group study. Even so, 70% of the employees questioned in this study indicate that they would be ready to rejoin the company if they had been satisfied with their departure. This is what is known as boomerang recruitment, which marks the return of ex-employees who thought the grass was greener elsewhere.
It's a safe bet that this 8% figure would be even lower if the question asked concerned trainee support.
As Generation Z is ultra-connected and communicative, giving an intern or alternant the benefit of support during their offboarding would probably be followed by tweets, whatsapp messages or snaps to their favorite contacts.
In this case, it's the company's Employer Brand that is the big winner of this offboarding policy, with improved brand awareness and attractiveness.
Since 2019, Komin.io has been working with startups and large corporations to play down the departure of employees and turn these inevitable departures into a performance lever. If we can break the paradigm that"interns aren't expensive, so we don't invest in them", we need to do the same with "he chose to resign, that traitor".
"With Komin, we have documented our operating procedures 10x faster than with paper"
- J. Cerruti (Methods & Industrialization Manager)
