When an employee leaves the company, the information is often communicated shortly before the actual departure. The subject is taboo, and the announcement is often postponed internally until as late as possible.

The IT department then has to react urgently to identify what equipment needs to be returned, what the employee had access to, who to redirect emails to, who will take over files, etc.

The absence of a structured IT offboarding process impacts the company as a whole: employer brand, productivity of the teams involved, data security, hardware and software expenditure.

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Employer branding: first AND last impressions count

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IT offboarding isn't just about recovering hardware and closing user accounts. It's also an opportunity to create a memorable last impression for the departing employee. 

When the process is well organized, it shows that the company cares about its employees right to the end. A smooth departure, with properly fenced-in IT access, can leave a positive impression on the former employee. On the other hand, a chaotic offboarding can leave a negative impression of the company, which will be shared with the former employee's professional network.

Every employee departure is an opportunity to strengthen (or weaken) your company's employer brand.

"85% of employees are ready to "speak well" of their company around them, if their departure "goes well"." - Source : Entreprendre

When IT offboarding is well managed, it helps to strengthen the employer brand. This can attract high-quality candidates and enhance the company's reputation in the job market. What's more, employees who leave on the right terms are more likely to consider returning to the company.

"33% of candidates turn down a job offer if the company conveys a poor image." - Source : Entreprendre magazine

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Team productivity - don't overlook the impact on the teams involved in IT offboarding of employees

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The IT department is often informed late of an employee's departure, and has to put down the pen to react quickly. Depending on the number of entries/exits, these repeated interruptions can represent a significant loss of productivity:

"It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task in hand." Source: article University of California

From there, it's an information hunt for IT teams, to identify the hardware and software resources that have been allocated to employees:

Review the arrival sheet, which summarizes what has been assigned (we talk about this in detail here). If the employee has been with us for a number of years, we need to be able to find any additional requests that may have been made in the ticketing tool or by email. IT then goes back to HR and the manager to make sure it has identified everything to which the employee had access, and the conditions of departure (contract end date vs. effective date, does he or she keep the phone or computer? etc.). 

Once the picture is complete, IT needs to identify the administrators of certain business software not directly managed by them. The existence of an employee/resource profile matrix will give them an exhaustive view of the solutions' functional administrators. Today, the explosion of SaaS software is forcing IT departments to structure the decentralization of functional management of business software, and to continually educate the business to ensure that it remains technically managed.

"IT and General Services spend 50% of their time searching for or understanding data" - Source: IDC 2018

IT support, SaaS software business managers, general services, etc. can then organize the recovery of equipment, badges, company cars, deactivation of SSO, deprovisioning of user accounts, etc. The timetable is often tight during departures, between the time the IT department is informed and the employee's actual departure. Well-structured IT offboarding helps to minimize disruption to the various departments, and to quickly obtain a consolidated view of the employee's staffing and who is the "owner".

"We mustn't wait until we're in an acceleration of input-output, but on the contrary structure these stages upstream so that IT can concentrate on projects that contribute to business performance and group acceleration." - Source: Philippe-Henry Sutter, CIO at Saqara

Data security - user accounts that remain accessible after an employee has left represent a risk

"50% of employees retain at least some access to company data after leaving the company" - Source: OneLogin survey

What are the risks to the company of former employees retaining software access after they've left?

• access to accounting software, invoicing and payment solutions, etc. risk of altering the financial data used to close the accounts. Statutory auditors regularly express reservations about the absence of software access management procedures for employee input/output. For the company, this represents additional audit costs, as the CACs have to ensure the integrity of the audited data in order to assess the company's financial health and results.
• access to CRM, customer files, access to solutions for drawing up quotations,.... leakage of sales data, loss of sales. An employee who has left to work for a competitor can identify projects in progress at his former employer, or access sales offers made to win a new customer. Of course, the employee who would have wanted to make CRM contacts could have done so long before leaving the company, but the normal course of business may be better protected.
• access to R&D data, project management solutions, etc. - all confidential data on patents and industrial knowledge that can leave the company and represent a structural risk.
• access to information protected by NDAs (confidentiality agreements), this data can be accessed and shared outside the company, exposing it to unauthorized disclosure, for which it has undertaken to do everything in its power to protect.

Lastly, accesses left open after departure are back doors through which ill-intentioned former employees could infect the information system and bring the company to a standstill; cases in the press are legion...

"A data breach represents a €2.5m loss for an SME" - Source: article Le Monde Informatique

Hardware & software expenses - how much are you paying for people who are no longer there?

A smartphone or computer that hasn't been returned - it happens, it's expensive, but these risks can be quickly fixed. The common practice to avoid these situations is to correlate the return of equipment with the payment of the balance. Provided, of course, that you have a clear view of what has been allocated to an employee throughout his or her time with the company...Good IT offboarding always starts with good IT onboarding.

The main financial stakes are in software access. So, yes, implementing SSO ensures that access to sensitive data in the main software applications is cut off at the time of departure. If you also use an IAM (Azure AD, Okta, OneLogin), you'll be able to automate the creation of user accounts for the main applications, but not deprovisioning, which will remain mainly manual.

"Unused software represents a loss of 43,000 euros for mid-market companies." - Source : article ITSocial

Quite often, an account review is organized periodically to reconcile departures on the HR side with user accounts in the various software applications on the IT side (Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.). This systematically produces a list of user accounts to be deprovisioned (people no longer with the company, etc.).

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Does your IT department have a clear view of the solutions to be deprovisioned when an employee leaves, both for solutions managed on the IT side and those managed by the business lines themselves?

A simple matrix of employee profiles and rights, coupled with an IT offboarding checklist , enables you to quickly identify the software you need to deprovision. 

When these 4 steps are structured, offboarding is under control. The employees have a good last experience within the company, the IT teams recover all the material and make sure that all the accesses are closed.

Don't ignoreIT Offboarding, because it could cost you dearly in terms of reputation, productivity, security and expenses. Structuring IT Offboarding is a wise investment in your company's development.