There's a buzz in the air when someone new joins a company. Teams come together to roll out the red carpet, offer warm welcome greetings, provide training and onboarding resources, and carefully curate first-week experiences.
Fast forward to the time when they decide to leave. What happens then? Radio silence!
Perhaps a few awkward emails, or a quick scramble to sign a goodbye card at best.
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Offboarding is still generally treated as an afterthought, an inconvenience, even in companies that pride themselves on employee experience.
However, an employee's decision to leave an organization is rarely an easy one; it can bring feelings of relief, concern, and sadness (HR Dept). The final impression of how you treat them leading up to their departure can last just as long as the first impression.
Chapters:
The problem with patchy offboarding
Offboarding may seem like a minor HR task, but if it's poorly organized and executed, the consequences can ripple across the entire organization.
The risks of getting it wrong might not be obvious, but they're big:
🔒 Compromised security
If IT access isn't promptly revoked, former employees could retain login credentials, email accounts, or VPN permissions. According to the HR Dept, nearly 90% of former employees retain access to some systems unless properly removed, which opens the door to data breaches, GDPR violations, and information leaks.
❓ Lost knowledge
When employees leave without a formal handover process, they take with them industry-specific skills, unique insights into their role, and critical context, everything from undocumented processes to client history, shortcuts, and internal relationships.
The loss of this wisdom can disrupt momentum, delay onboarding for replacements, and lead to costly knowledge gaps.
😤 Negative exit experiences
Employees often remember how they were treated on the way out more vividly than how they were welcomed.
A disorganized offboarding process can leave employees feeling ignored, devalued, and confused. Without clear communication, they may not know what's expected of them, what's owed to them, or who to contact for support.
We now live in a world where word of mouth and online reviews are prevalent. According to HR Magazine, over 69% of employees write online reviews of their former employers on sites like Glassdoor, with more than half of those reviews being negative, which can potentially damage your organization's reputation and discourage new talent from applying.
Indeed suggests that employees who leave on good terms are more likely to speak positively about the organization. Still, if the exit is cold or chaotic, the damage can be lasting.
🔥 Burned bridges
When employees leave without a formal handover process, they take with them industry-specific skills, unique insights into their role, and critical context, everything from undocumented processes to client history, shortcuts, and internal relationships.
The loss of this wisdom can disrupt momentum, delay onboarding for replacements, and lead to costly knowledge gaps.
Automation: the missing piece
Even with good intentions, offboarding often fails in execution, not because people don’t care, but because there are too many moving parts. Organizations that automate offboarding reduce risk and improve the exit experience for everyone involved.
This is where employee onboarding and offboarding solutions, such as Applaud’s Journeys, can help HR deliver streamlined, compliant, and personal workflows that scale with the business.
What to look for in an offboarding automation tool
Choosing the right tool to automate onboarding and offboarding can save time, reduce security risks, and provide a smoother experience for both employees and managers. So what should HR and IT leaders look for?
Core capabilities
- Flexible workflows: Look for tools that provide pre-built templates for common processes, but also allow you to customise and adapt them to your employees’ and organisation’s needs (e.g., different journeys for contractors, global employees, remote staff, or executives).
- Robust integrations: The best platforms connect seamlessly with your HRIS/ATS (like Workday), identity systems (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), collaboration tools (Slack, Teams), and even business apps (Sharepoint, Confluence, ServiceNow).
- Provisioning and de-provisioning: Automated account creation and removal across multiple apps helps avoid costly mistakes. Role-based access controls and group assignments maintain clean and consistent permissions.
- Security and compliance: Ensure the platform provides detailed audit logs, compliance-ready reporting (eg ISO 27001), and diligent permission controls to minimize risk.
Evaluation criteria:
- Ease of use: HR and IT teams should be able to design workflows without heavy coding. A clear dashboard, reporting tools, and no-code builders are key.
- Scalability: The tool should work just as well for 200 employees as it does for 20,000, and support hybrid or remote workforces.
- User experience: Look for solutions that are intuitive, mobile-friendly, and designed with a clean interface, allowing employees to quickly complete tasks, such as submitting an exit survey, returning equipment, or checking benefits.
- Cost and ROI: Be clear on the pricing model (per-user, per-app, or flat fee) and what’s included. The real ROI often comes from reducing manual IT work, preventing security risks, and improving retention through better experiences.
- Vendor reliability: Consider the strength of customer support, the pace of product updates, and case studies from companies like yours.
💡A good starting point is to map your current onboarding and offboarding processes, where are the manual steps, bottlenecks, and risks? From there, you can evaluate tools against your real-world needs and choose the one that best suits your needs.
An example offboarding journey with Applaud
Let’s say Priya, a marketing manager, hands in her resignation.
Day 0 – Resignation logged
- Priya’s manager enters the resignation date into the HR system.
- Applaud instantly triggers a tailored offboarding workflow, personalised to Priya’s role and location.
Day 1 – Notifications & admin
- IT is automatically notified to schedule access removal for email, apps, and shared drives on Priya’s final day.
- Facilities receive a task to arrange collection of her laptop and access card.
- Payroll is notified to finalise compensation and benefits.
- Priya’s manager is prompted to arrange a farewell gift and last-day get-together.
- Priya receives a personalised welcome message to her offboarding journey, outlining what to expect, including her final pay date, equipment return instructions, and optional alumni resources.
Day 3 – Handover begins
- Priya is guided to complete a knowledge handover checklist, including current campaigns, vendor contacts, and passwords.
- Applaud assigns relevant tasks to her team members to absorb responsibilities,
ensuring a smooth transition.
Day 7 – Exit survey & reflection
- Priya receives a thoughtful and well-timed exit survey, asking about her experience and suggestions for improvement.
- Priya’s manager is prompted to schedule an exit conversation, supported with suggested talking points from Applaud’s content management.
Final Day
- A farewell gift is presented to Priya, and colleagues come together to wish her well.
- Priya gets access to an optional alumni portal for referrals, networking, and updates.
- All systems access is revoked automatically, and a confirmation audit log is stored securely.
After departure
- Insights from Priya’s feedback are added to a central dashboard.
- The HR team reviews trends across exit surveys and handover notes to inform future improvements.
This kind of structured, automated process ensures nothing is missed, and nobody is left feeling confused, devalued, or ignored. It balances compliance, logistics, and humanity, and it’s all managed from one place.
Different exits, different journeys
While Priya’s story shows what a voluntary resignation can look like, not every exit is the same.
Terminations for poor conduct, attendance, or performance, redundancy, retirement, or even sensitive situations like death in service all require different workflows, tone, and legal considerations.
The value of automation lies in its flexibility. HR can design multiple templates, respectful and compassionate for redundancy, highly secure and immediate for dismissals, supportive for retirement, ensuring every type of exit is handled appropriately, compliantly, and with humanity.
Final thoughts: offboarding deserves more attention
Offboarding isn’t just the end of an employee’s time with your company; it’s the beginning of your legacy with them.
When handled poorly, it can lead to compliance issues, security risks, lost knowledge, and reputational damage.
But when it’s structured and human-centred, it becomes a moment of respect, reflection, and even advocacy.
The risks of getting it wrong are real, from employees retaining system access and taking critical knowledge with them, to poor exit experiences that damage your employer brand.
However, as illustrated in the offboarding journey example, offboarding automation can streamline logistics while maintaining the human touch. Employees feel supported, managers stay informed, and HR regains time.
Modern employee onboarding and offboarding software solutions, such as Applaud, make offboarding easy. You can automate the essentials, personalise the experience, and ensure every leaver, whether a graduate or an executive, exits on good terms.
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About the Author
Michelle Donnelly is a technical writing manager with nearly twenty years of experience in design, communication, training, and enablement. She brings a unique blend of creativity and clarity to technical writing, product enablement, and customer education, ensuring that complex information is both accessible and engaging.