Don’t Let Your Data Walk Out the Door: 5 Must-Follow Tips for Offboarding Employees

Employees come and go. But when it’s time for them to go, things can get messy real fast. The security of your proprietary data, intellectual property and devices are all at risk. 

In fact, there’s a 1 in 3 chance you’ll lose critical IP when an employee quits.

In many companies, the offboarding process often takes a back seat. When it’s not managed effectively, the tasks are fragmented and handled by different departments in isolation. This disjointed approach can lead to missed steps, increased risk of data loss and poorly managed access permissions.

Forrester’s Best Practices for Securely Offboarding Employees report found that security teams overlook the importance of working with both risk/compliance and HR teams during this time, which further contributes to disjointed, ineffective offboarding processes. 

Only 8% of the security technology decision-makers surveyed currently work with the risk/compliance teams as part of offboarding, and those that work with HR teams was only slightly better at 10%.

So how do you make sure your data doesn’t walk out the door with departing employees? Follow these five tips recommended by Forrester.

1. Develop clear offboarding workflows

Every employee exit is different. Forrester says having multiple processes in place for various scenarios is key: “No single process works every time. Factors like the type of departure, role, location, data access…all determine how the process will flow.”

To address these complexities, HR, IT and security leaders should create custom workflows for different employee departure scenarios. These processes must be well-documented to ensure compliance with company policies and provide a clear record for accountability and transparency.

2. Train your teams

Many companies focus their training on onboarding and neglect offboarding. But Forrester finds that contextual offboarding training ensures people know what part they play, and what they’ll be expected to do when the time comes.

The recommendation is to create training that is tailored to the specific roles and responsibilities of individuals involved in the offboarding process. This sends a clear signal of what employees can or can’t do, limiting the chances of data loss and ensuring a smoother and more efficient transition when the need arises.

3. Leverage technology

Managing offboarding via manual processes is risky. By automating workflows and incorporating technology solutions instead, businesses can establish standardized workflows that cover various aspects of offboarding, from revoking application access to backing up data and terminating user accounts.