In 2023, the Future of Work is far from over. The digitalization of the HR function is progressing, with new tools emerging every day, each with more revolutionary promises than the last (Komin.io is no exception 😉 ).
These innovations are most often based on functionalities, such as automation, that address very concrete HR/administrative operational objectives: reducing the cost of recruitment, facilitating payroll execution, improving the company's employer brand, simplifying individual appraisals, and so on.
For several months now, and still on a daily basis, we have been interviewing HR experts and operational staff, to understand their perception of the employee experience, knowledge transfer and the levers of their employer brand. While certain objectives, such as onboarding for example, seem mature and spontaneously come to the fore, offboarding has a singular place in HR discourse.
If I summarize their feedback when we talk about offboarding, it goes something like this:
"Employer branding is a must! Employee Experience? Of course it's a priority for us! And offboarding? Hang on, I'm going through a tunnel. Hello, hello..."
Well, that's not entirely true. In almost all cases, when offboarding is mentioned in the context of the employee experience, the first reflex is to admit that"yes, it's a subject", but this is often followed by "...but today it's not a priority".
The most surprising thing comes when we dig deeper, when we ask why offboarding "is a topic" and what stakes our interlocutors would see in addressing it better:
85% of respondents with an "operational manager" role indicate that their objective in addressing offboarding would be toimprove their personal productivity, i.e. to save time in managing (their employees).
Nearly 70% of operational managers say they aim to train new recruits more quickly. In a way, they want to act on the employee's "break-even point", the point at which he or she brings in at least what he or she costs the company. These managers want to ensure that, at the time of offboarding, a transfer of knowledge is carried out and effectively assimilated by the onboardee afterwards.
If the consensus is so strong, it's because the cost of turnover today must be significant for companies and in the minds of operational staff.
When interviewing HR experts, the feedback differs and the objectives are more focused on the attractiveness of the company:
If, by better addressing offboarding, managers imagine gains in operational performance, and HR imagines benefits in terms of Employer Brand, why is it that the majority of people we talk to still suffer from "tunnel vision" when it comes to offboarding?
The offboarding ecosystem today is a No Man's Land, and there is still resistance among companies to adopting a solution that facilitates offboarding. Are we all like Thomas Aquinas, believing only what we see? Employer branding and onboarding haven't always been in the TOP5 HRTech buzzwords, and the solutions that revolve around them have had to make their way to the top of the HR priority pile!
The War for Talent continues to rage, forcing companies to beef up their arguments to appear more attractive. Komin's bet is that offboarding is an extremely strong element of employer branding, just like onboarding. Now it's up to companies like Komin.io to demonstrate the concrete results that such a solution can achieve.
Since the end of 2019, we have been supporting our customers in implementing a value-creating offboarding policy. Komin will be no exception, and it's a safe bet that before there's a mass awareness of the importance of an offboarding policy, we'll have to respect the law of diffusion of innovation (dear Everett Rogers), according to which innovations are first tested by innovators, then early adopters, etc. (see diagram below).
*/**: source: Kio Software 2019 survey of 65 managers in France
"With Komin, we have documented our operating procedures 10x faster than with paper"
- J. Cerruti (Methods & Industrialization Manager)
