Tech Team Offboarding: Should You Have a Process in Place?

Ever wondered why some companies thrive despite high turnover rates, while others struggle to recover from the departure of a single team member? Talent retention is not the only must-have for building strong tech teams. A poorly performed employee offboarding process puts tech projects off the track.

I have dealt with tech teams of different sizes and structures, and can say that there are some offboarding rules, which tech businesses cannot afford to break. I am to provide you with IT offboarding tips based on a decade of my experience in tech hiring at Outstaff Your Team.

Business Value of the IT Offboarding Process: Why To Prepare in Advance?

Offboarding is not merely about waving goodbye to a departing team member. It's a strategic process that impacts the entire company.

Having a well-defined offboarding process, you can:

• Transfer the knowledge, skills, and responsibilities of the departing team member seamlessly;
• Prevent any disruptions in ongoing projects;
• Maintain a positive company culture and team morale.

HR routine associated with offboarding includes a bunch of tasks, which could seem not time-consuming or complex at first. Yet, any missed offboarding task may turn into a serious concern in the long run, including the loss of sensitive data and even clients. The average price for one ineffective offboarding was calculated as of nearly $7,5K due to the survey at the beginning of 2023.

Practice Tips for Successful Offboarding: How to Prepare in Advance?

The first offboarding step begins during onboarding, when an HR specialist or an onboarding specialist notifies newcomers about a leave notice period for their roles and the ways to inform the team in case of leaving.

Yet, companies should not wait for day X when they get a leave notice to create a leaving roadmap. Ideally, plans for onboarding and offboarding should both exist before you hire someone.

A clear offboarding plan is related to an onboarding program for new employees, where you sign documents and add your newcomer to the corporate systems and chats, linking a specialist to the company step by step. This plan should document “mirror actions” to help you break all the chain links backwards without causing errors.

Let’s take a closer look at the actions.

Decide on Tooling

You’ll need some software where you can visualize a progress bar for your IT offboarding process. It’s perfect if you already have an HRIS (human resources information system) containing all the specialists’ profiles. Some of such systems offer pre-built settings for organizing HR processes like onboarding and offboarding.

If you don’t have an HRIS yet, another option would be to fix the task performance in task trackers like Asana or Trello.

Prepare Employee Offboarding Checklist

Here are the must-haves of a successful offboarding checklist.

Communication

✅ Notify stakeholders. Together with the leaving specialist, agree on the last working day and decide when it’s better to inform the team. Try to reveal that fact as soon as possible. Thus, you can avoid gossip and reassign responsibilities in a more stress-free way.

Knowledge transfer

All the processes from this section go smoothly if you practice ongoing knowledge sharing within your team. Then, you’ll need to adjust instructions rather than create them from scratch. It’s a great approach not only for offboarding, it’s the main secret of easy team scaling and upskilling.

✅ Prepare future hiring and training processes. To do that, evaluate the performance and contributions of the departing IT specialist. Typically, a specialist’s project manager is aware of a team member’s outstanding tasks. To make sure 100% of the tasks were completed or reassigned to other people, direct managers also may gather feedback from team members who worked closely with the departing IT specialist.

✅ Code Repositories. Ensure access to code repositories is revoked, and ownership is transferred.

✅ Update and organize technical documentation for a smooth handover.

✅ Review and update standard operating procedures (SOPs). Your goal is to replace the task performer with another team member. In case you don’t have any SOPs yet, I strongly recommend you consider documenting business operations, as they debunk potential misunderstandings and help newcomers sort everything out.

✅ Culture Integration. When explaining the reasons for a team-mate's leaving to the entire team, frame them in a positive light. Reassure the team about the company's commitment to the specialist's well-being. Fill the vacant position quickly to reduce the workload on the rest of team members. When a new team member joins, celebrate the new beginning.

Security Measures

76% of business leaders say that offboarding is a serious security threat.

✅ Account Deactivation. Disable access to company systems, emails, and other digital platforms.

✅ Revoke API Tokens. Secure APIs by revoking tokens associated with the departing employee.

✅ Data Leakage Prevention. Remind leaving specialists about NDA compliance. If you didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement with your (almost ex-) team members, you can still stay safe by deploying data loss prevention solutions that can monitor, detect, and prevent unauthorized data transfers.

✅ Return Company Assets. Ensure the return of all company-owned equipment and assets if you have provided any.

Administrative busywork (exit documentation)

✅ Benefits and Final Payments. Provide information about benefits continuation and process final payments promptly.

✅ Offboarding documents. Complete all necessary legal paperwork related to contract termination.

Feedback

✅ Exit Interview. Conduct a meaningful exit interview (not a survey) to gather insights into the employee's experience and reasons for leaving. Thus, you will be able to analyze it and identify areas for improvement in workflows and team collaboration.

✅ Alumni Program. Introduce departing employees to an alumni program if you have any. That fosters a positive relationship after departure.

Track the Offboarding Progress

Even the perfect offboarding strategy can misfire if there are no people personally responsible for its execution. I recommend you develop an employee offboarding checklist covering all the necessary steps, and then divide it into separate to-do lists for all the involved people so that they can focus on their parts. I’d set a deadline for each task and assign it to people who will actually cover it (even if it’s me).

Ensuring compliance with legal timelines and a specialist’s comfort is essential. To measure the efficacy of the offboarding process, I’d assess the time from resignation submission to the last working day. Status change processing should not take longer than planned. During this period, 99% of offboarding tasks should be completed. The typical exception is the last payment. It’s absolutely okay to send it on the usual payment date for your company if you’ve agreed so beforehand.

Offboarding Matters for Both a Company and Departing Specialists

Implementing an effective offboarding checklist not only mitigates potential risks, but also:

1. Transforms departures into opportunities for growth and improvement;
2. Helps tech teams keep their knowledge base updated all the time.

So, should you have a process in place for tech team offboarding? The answer is a resounding yes.

Create a working employee offboarding checklist and stick to it.

Some in-house HR teams can manage employee offboarding successfully if a team manager asks them to keep such a focus. In other situations, additional expertise is needed. For instance, companies may consider professional tech team onboarding services when they:

• Don’t have an HR department and need a team which can take over all the HR-related administrative busywork and well-being checks;
• Don’t have/lack specialists proficient in tech hiring, which typically is more complicated and needs more interview rounds;
• Hire in foreign countries and require local expertise;
• Face high retention rates or/and other weak points in their tech teams and want to get an independent and professional teamwork’s audit.

Regardless of which specialists are responsible to offboard team members, in-house or third-party ones, the checklist provided in this article will help them organize successful offboarding. Each part of this basic checklist is crucial. Offboarding team or a specialist should track the tasks related to 5 aspects: ethical and on-time communication, well-documented knowledge transfer, security measures, completed administrative paperwork, and gathering feedback not for show but for improvement.

I encourage you to think of offboarding as the counterpart of onboarding and prepare both parts in advance!