When the moment arrives to bid farewell to remarkable ex-hires, shifting your focus toward security is crucial. Now, we’re not saying an ex-hire will turn rogue and do you dirty by partying with some of your more embarrassing or lucrative corporate data, but why risk it? Here’s where an effective employee offboarding checklist will help you shut down a whole piñata of security risks, including grungy ex-hires.
Do I Really Need an Employee Offboarding Checklist for My Rockstar Team?
Absolutely! Those flashy, over-the-top onboarding checklists have overshadowed offboarding checklists for far too long. Time to step out of the spotlight! We all know that checklists are the backbone of a well-functioning civilization. They not only save lives but also ensure tasks are completed in the right order. With every tick on the checklist, you get a satisfying boost of dopamine — it’s just science. So, why should you bother with an offboarding checklist?
Let’s explore the reasons:
- Controls Access: Proper offboarding guarantees that only authorized individuals have access to your data and systems. It’s essential to restrict access for ex-employees.
- Protects Data: Your organization possesses valuable, confidential, and sensitive information—customer and client details, intellectual property, financial records, and perhaps even your master plan for world domination. You have a responsibility to safeguard this data. Implementing best practices for offboarding maintains a protective layer and mitigates potential vulnerabilities.
- Saves Cost: You might be surprised to learn that you’re still paying for cloud accounts and licenses of ex-employees that were never properly closed. Additionally, poor offboarding practices can lead to productivity losses and even costly data breaches.
- Maintains Compliance: Often, you have a legal obligation to protect data, especially if you are accredited by a data security framework like SOC 2 or HIPAA. Secure offboarding is an implicit requirement in such cases. Furthermore, maintaining high levels of compliance may be part of your IT governance practices.
- Streamlines Processes: A well-crafted checklist ensures that offboarding is done smoothly, efficiently, and without errors. Checklists simply make everything better.
What Are The Key Tasks Of An Effective Employee Offboarding Checklist?
Before we dive into the essential tasks of an efficient employee offboarding checklist, let’s establish a few assumptions.
We’ve made assumptions that:
- You use MDM to manage your fleet, but the principles of a best-practice offboarding checklist should be effective however you manage your IT.
- You’re working with your HR people to ensure that they’ll give you the information you need at the right time to kickstart the IT offboarding process to the right timeline.
- Your checklist is a shareable online resource with clever functions that allow you to assign responsibilities for actions, track progress, and confirm an ex-hire has been fully offboarded.
Now let’s go with the tasks:
1. Deactivate and Revoke Access
Just as you provisioned your hire with all the accounts, files, and apps they needed for their role, it’s time to reverse the process. Remove them from groups such as Azure and Slack, and close down their access to your CRM resources and file repositories. Deactivate and close their accounts for the tools they’re using, such as GitHub or Adobe Creative Suite, and close down their password manager, 2FA tokens, or cloud single sign-on access.
If it’s open, close it.
2. Secure Corporate Data
If you have a BYOD policy, secure any corporate data on your employee’s personal device. If you’re using mobile application management (MAM), you’ll already have measures in place to block your user from copying over corporate data to their personal files; the next step is to retrieve corporate data (if it’s not already backed up), remove corporate apps, and wipe corporate data.
3. Disconnect Networks
Make sure they’re no longer on any access control lists for network access privileges by reviewing and updating your lists. Block your ex-hire’s access to corporate networks by revoking their corporate VPN and wifi credentials.
4. Control Physical Access
Arrange for the return of any corporate device still in your ex-hire’s possession, and any other data storage hardware such as external hard drives, SSDs, and physical access devices like access cards or keys. Has a laptop gone AWOL? If you’re using MDM, simply lock down that bad boy and wipe the data.
5. Communicate
It’s important to manage the people left behind, be they colleagues or clients. If an employee leaves suddenly, their contacts can be left, at best, puzzled, and, at worst, dialing 911. Hopefully, HR and the management team will have magicked a smooth handover for streamlined continuity, but it’s good practice to create email autoresponders and mail forwarding.
By following these tasks as part of your offboarding checklist, you can ensure a smooth transition
Employee Offboarding Shouldn’t Make You Cry!
An effective employee onboarding checklist is like IRA contributions — something you wished you’d started years ago. But dry your eyes because we’re here to build you one of your very own, and probably by Friday. Even if you don’t already have MDM, we’ll get you started, so give us a call.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Contact us now–chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!