Offboarding Automation: What It is and How to Implement It

More than 50% of employees who leave an organization take valuable information with them. Additionally, close to 50% of ex-employees still have access to corporate apps after leaving an organization. And that about 43% of companies reveal that their former employees have access to company code repositories on GitLab and GitHub.

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!

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).

It involves using automation technology to manage most of the processes that happen once an employee leaves (or his departure is confirmed) an organization. For example, you can automate tasks like recovering company assets, revoking system access, and scheduling exit interviews.

Related: What is HR automation?

Offboarding processes that can be automated

Some of the offboarding workflows that you can automate include:

• De-provisioning: Removing an employee’s access to apps and equipment.
• Alert routing: Notifying the appropriate stakeholders when concerning behavior takes place. It also involves notifying the relevant departments like IT and HR of the employee departure so that they can take the necessary action.
• 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. Automating final paycheck processing and notifying benefits providers such as insurance to terminate their coverage to the departing employee.
• Asset recovery: triggering automatic notifications to ensure that the employee returns all the company properties including laptops, cars, keys.

How to Automate Offboarding 

To automate offboarding successfully, you’ll need to first identify the specific workflows you want to automate.

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. Automation platforms you can choose include Workday for scheduling of interviews or Workato for deprovisioning.

Once you’ve an automation platform and know the offboarding tasks to automate, it is time to set up workflows. Automation platforms have pre-built templates for automating offboarding workflows. They also allow you to create customized workflows.

Finally, test that the workflows are working as intended and refine them where necessary.

Examples of Offboarding Automation

Automating a de-provisioning workflow

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:

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.

Automating a payroll offboarding workflow with Microsoft Entra

Microsoft Entra allows you to run Lifecycle Workflows like real-time employee separation workflow that removes users from all teams, deletes user accounts, and removes licenses from users. To automate a payroll offboarding workflow in Microsoft Entra, use the post-offboarding of an employee template to specify which employee the workflow applies. Then, determine when the workflow triggers. You can set the workflow to trigger hours or days after the employee’s leave date. Once this workflow runs, it removes the employee details from the payroll system and notifies the payroll department, ensuring final payments are processed.

Workato integrates with Microsoft Entra and Workday to automate offboarding processes. For example, Workato’s Azure AD connector helps in employee deprovisioning. When you make payroll changes on Workday during offboarding, Workato synchronizes those changes with ADP.

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:

Save on Time

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

Enhance Security

Manual processes are error-prone and can lead to data leaks. Offboarding automation allows HR teams to resolve security issues promptly. 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 workflow 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.

Scale Seamlessly

As your organization grows, so too will the number of employees you offboard. Automated systems can manage offboarding tasks on a large scale with accuracy and efficiency. By adopting automation, you can more easily offboard a higher number of employees, as each requires less of a time commitment by your team.

Gain a competitive advantage

When we asked more than 200 technology leaders which HR automations their organizations have implemented, offboarding came in last place.

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. You also free the HR team time to focus on other organizational development work such as performance management, employee training, and career planning.

Improve offboarding experience

Automation ensures a smooth and efficient offboarding process. Employees who experience an efficient offboarding process leave with a good impression about the organization. Such employees will likely to become goodwill ambassadors, promoting the organization to potential clients and employees. Former employees who had a smooth offboarding experience might consider returning to the organization in the future, bringing back valuable experience and knowledge.

Final Thoughts

Poor offboarding practices can put an organization at risk of data leaks, regulatory noncompliance, and operation inefficiencies. Automation is a way to simplify the employee offboarding process and avoid associated risks. Automation tools help you create offboarding workflows and automate repetitive tasks.Workato is an enterprise automation platform that supports the building of offboarding automation workflows. Request a free demo to experience how Workato can streamline your offboarding workflows.