Offboarding Automation: What It is and How to Implement It

How to implement offboarding automation

More than half of employees who leave an organization take valuable information with them. 

This can adversely impact your organization in all sorts of ways, from violating compliance regulations—like HIPPA and GDPR—to giving trade secrets to competitors.

To prevent this type of risk from becoming a reality, and to keep things easy on your team, you can turn to offboarding automation. 

How does offboarding automation work? What can you do to implement it? And what kinds of benefits can you expect once it’s put into place? We’ll answer each of these questions so that you can make the most of the HR automation!

See how Workato can help you build enterprise-grade offboarding automations with ease by scheduling a demo.

What is Offboarding Automation?

Offboarding automation is the use of automation to streamline the end-to-end process of offboarding employees. It requires an enterprise automation platform that can listen to your apps for business events (or triggers) that drive real-time outcomes (or actions). 

Related: What is HR automation?

How to Automate Offboarding 

To automate offboarding successfully, you’ll need to first identify the specific workflows you want to automate. Here are some popular processes worth considering:

  • De-provisioning: Removing an employee’s access to apps and equipment
  • Alert routing: Notifying the appropriate stakeholders when concerning behavior takes place
  • Exit interviews: Both scheduling them and moving the departing employee’s feedback to the appropriate places
  • Updating payroll: The systems that play a role in managing payroll account for the employee’s departure 

Once you’ve identified and prioritized the workflows you want to streamline, you can (for each process) use an enterprise automation platform to connect the relevant apps, and then build a trigger and its corresponding set of actions. 

For example, to automate a de-provisioning workflow, you’ll need to connect your HRIS (e.g. Workday) with your ticketing tool (e.g. ServiceNow), your directory service (e.g. Active Directory), and a security platform like SentinelOne

You can then build an end-to-end workflow automation that works like the following:

An offboarding automation that de-provisions employee access to apps and equipment.

1. Once an employee is marked as terminated in Workday, the workflow gets triggered.
2. Tickets related to de-provisioning the employees’ access to apps and equipment get created in ServiceNow.
3. At the end of the employee’s last day, they’re removed from various groups in Active Directory.
4. Also at the end of the employee’s last day, SentinelOne deactivates the employee’s access to their laptop.

Why You Should Automate Offboarding 

Now that you understand what employee offboarding automation is and how you can implement it, you’re probably excited about using it at your organization. In case you need any more convincing, here are some of the top reasons to adopt it:

1. It saves your team a significant amount of time. Instead of performing tasks manually, like scheduling exit interviews or updating individual systems once an employee leaves, your automations can perform them on your behalf (and do so on time and with accuracy). This not only saves your team time, but it also enables you and your colleagues to dedicate more time and energy on business-critical tasks.

2. It lets you address security concerns quickly. For instance, if an employee is set to leave shortly, and performs seemingly suspicious behavior in a platform like Box, you can build an offboarding automation that notifies the manager in real-time via chat (e.g. Slack). From there, the manager can revoke the employee’s access to any Box folder with just a click.

3. It can scale alongside your organization. As your organization grows, so too will the number of employees you offboard. By adopting the automation, you can more easily offboard a higher number of employees, as each requires less of a time commitment by your team.

4. It gives your team a competitive advantage. When we asked more than 200 technology leaders which HR automations their organizations have implemented, offboarding came in last place.

A list of the top offboarding activities that organizations have automated.

This means that if your organization can put it into practice, you’ll gain an edge in safeguarding your data, saving employees time, and scaling your business.

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Ready to streamline your offboarding workflows?

You can use Workato, the leader in enterprise automation, to build offboarding automations with ease.

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About the author
Jon Gitlin Content Strategist @ Workato
Jon Gitlin is the Managing Editor of The Connector, where you can get the latest news on Workato and uncover tips, examples, and frameworks for implementing powerful integrations and automations. In his free time, he loves to run outside, watch soccer (er...football) matches, and explore local restaurants.