How to Automate Employee Offboarding

Employee offboarding automation empowers companies to streamline their offboarding processes without sacrificing security. A platform like Lumos can empower organizations with powerful, easy-to-configure tools for efficient and effective workflow automations. Keep reading for an overview of the employee offboarding process—and the roles technology and automation play in creating a positive offboarding experience. 

What Is the Employee Offboarding Process?

Employee offboarding is what occurs at the end of the employee lifecycle, book-ended by the onboarding process at its onset. It consists of several steps meant to respect and protect the rights of both the (soon-to-be-former) employee and their employer. 

What Steps Are Included in an Offboarding Process? 

While no two offboarding processes will be identical, a basic framework should consist of at least five key components:

• Revoking Access: When an employee leaves the company, their access to company-owned systems, networks, and applications should be promptly disabled or revoked, as should their various login credentials.

• Backing Up/Transferring Data: Depending on what projects the employee may have worked on (or been working on), it’s important to effectively back up their data—which can then be transferred to other team members and/or managers so that work can continue with minimum disruption.

• Recovering Hardware: Collect all company-owned hardware, like laptops or tablets, mobile devices, and other equipment. If the employee had any physical access controls or badges, they should also be collected ASAP.

• Managing Software and Licenses: With the average organization using well over 100 different applications, the license costs really add up. Unfortunately, it’s all too common for some of these licenses to slip through the cracks and remain active, despite the employee’s tenure with the company coming to a close. These unused licenses cost the company money and can lead to security vulnerabilities if not quickly deactivated or reassigned to other users, which is where an employee offboarding automation platform can make a major difference.  

• Perform an Audit and Compliance Check: Another employee offboarding best practice involves conducting an audit of the employee’s prior access to various applications, in order to identify unusual or unauthorized activity—and determine whether the company’s data may be at risk. These audits also help companies to maintain compliance with various organizational policies or industry-based regulations. 

If you’re looking for a more tactical, step-by-step list of responsibilities, check out our offboarding checklist resource.

Why Is the Offboarding Process Important?

Especially if you have more than a handful of employees, creating efficient and effective onboarding processes can mitigate security risks while saving both time and money. And in an era where employee experience is more important than ever, ensuring that employees leave the organization on positive terms can help employers to attract talent in the future.

How Do You Automate an Exit Process?

An identity governance tool like Lumos makes it possible to streamline and automate many elements of the employee offboarding process—and it’s probably easier than you think. So, what are examples of automated processes for employee offboarding? Two of the most common are access and data management.

• Access management includes things like auditing the employee’s user accounts and usage of various applications, revoking or reassigning access as needed, and creating custom automations for common offboarding workflows and tasks.

• Data management involves taking inventory of the employee’s projects and accounts, identifying important data, and transferring it to the appropriate manager or team.

The easiest way to automate employee onboarding and offboarding is leveraging a platform like Lumos. Our platform empowers IT pros with intuitive tools they can use to automate key processes, like:

• Initiating offboarding processes through automations based on custom triggers such as status changes, end dates, or API calls;
• Automatically disabling/revoking departing employees’ access to company systems, networks, and assets;
• Delegating manual tasks including data and asset recovery through custom-configured automations; and
• Tracking and managing the allocation of apps and licenses during employee transitions.

Should Onboarding be Automated, Too?

Yes—many of the same benefits also apply to employee onboarding automation. Unlike offboarding processes, though, employee onboarding plays a crucial role in getting new employees up to speed and influencing their initial impressions of the company. 

Using a solution like Lumos makes it easy to configure—and automate—custom onboarding and offboarding workflows, saving valuable time and ensuring that the business continues to run smoothly throughout any personnel changes or transitions.

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If you’re looking for a streamlined and secure way to automate onboarding and offboarding processes, start your search with Lumos. With our powerful platform, you can automate most—if not all—of your employee onboarding and offboarding processes, and so much more. Book a demo!