More company leaders need to focus on how they treat employees on their way out of the company. Many company leaders and HR personnel think of outgoing employees as not their problem anymore, but the poor treatment of exiting employees can come back to bite HR departments and company leaders in unexpected ways.
HR leaders are starting to take offboarding as seriously as onboarding for several reasons. Many of these reasons stem from practicality. Every day, the workforce in the US gets a little younger. More millennials and Generation Zers are entering the workplace with different expectations than older generations. Overall, employee turnover in the United States is the highest it’s been in nearly two decades. The reasons for this are complex, but one factor is that younger workers simply don’t expect to stay with the same company their entire career.
We can dissect the many differences between older and younger employees in the workplace all day long, but probably the largest difference across the generations is Generations Y and Z being willing to leave for greener pastures, or, in some cases just different pastures. By properly offboarding employees, you’ll see a much higher rate of returners. Employees will be more willing to come back to you after leaving if they remember being listened to. Hiring employees who have already worked for your company saves you time and money in employee training and helps with workplace efficiency.
Proper, high-impact offboarding can improve several aspects of HR, including retention, recruiting, and recognizing toxic workplace issues. How can HR build high-impact offboarding processes?
Employee Offboarding: Prioritizing the Employee
HR departments of the past didn’t have to manage the resignation of many employees. Workers in many companies stayed for decades, and most companies didn’t have to worry about high employee turnover rates.
But now, HR departments need to do everything they can to manage their employee turnover costs. No company will ever eliminate turnover, but when employees are prioritized during the offboarding process, turnover becomes more manageable.
You can’t prioritize all employees equally, however. You must understand the business and workplace impact of each position and department and allocate a disproportionate amount of your offboarding resources to the positions, individuals, and departments that will have the highest impact on future employees. For example, it’s much more valuable to understand why your product development manager is resigning than your mailroom intern. The product development manager will have a better perspective of the people who worked under him or her and will provide you with more valuable insight into their work environment you can use to improve the department and the company.
If you prioritize the employee who’s on their way out, you’ll get insight into your brand as an employer and your work practices that can help you improve engagement for your other employees.
Reduce Turnover and Identify Problem Areas in the Workplace
Depending on who you ask, as much as three-quarters of the cost of employee turnover is preventable. Part of that cost is due to employees walking out the door with valuable information unshared in their brains. This information about employees’ work environments and the true reason why they left is crucial to improving your workplace communication and other factors that cause employees to quit.
In the past, the exit interview was a standard HR method of getting to the real reason behind employees leaving the company. The problem with this, as more HR departments have realized, is that it typically is conducted when the employee still needs a positive reference for their next position. They don’t always feel comfortable expressing their true feelings if they feel their future employment somewhere else is at stake. Exit interviews also produce wildly different results depending on who conducts the interview. If an exiting employee has an exit interview with the very manager who ran them off, the chances of that manager receiving honest feedback are minimal.
Instead of conducting exit interviews on the employee’s last day, conduct them three to six months after they leave. Their memory of what it was like to work in your office might not be as sharp, but without the need for a positive reference, they will be more honest about their impressions of the work environment, which they will not forget.
You can use information from exiting employees to learn how your work environment functions for your employees. Even though HR often has several ways of rooting out problems in the workplace, from managers accused of harassment to disruptive assistants, anonymous reporting is effective at identifying and dealing with toxic employees and environments. But the safe exit interview, that is, after an exiting employee has already found a new job, can offer the most honest and eye-opening portrait of employee experiences at your company. Discrimination, harassment, bullying, and other disruptive and hostile behaviors can go on for years, unseen and undetected by management, unless employees and ex-employees stand up and report it. Who better to identify problem areas in your workforce than someone who was there and has no incentive to obscure the facts?
Do Better Next Time
Improving your workplace strengthens your employer brand and improves engagement and communication for the employees still working there. Another way to improve your brand as an employer is to set up a company alumni group where ex-employees can meet and network with each other to compare notes or just say hello. By creating a space where ex-employees can improve their networks and find success outside your company, you’re communicating that you care about them, even when they leave, which is probably the best thing you can do for your employer brand. People who have never worked with you before will seek your company out because they heard about all the good things in the former employee social group.
Employee offboarding should be taken as seriously as onboarding. The results might not be immediate, but over time, your brand and your company will greatly improve recruiting, onboarding, communication, and engagement indicators.