Top 5 Benefits of Employee Offboarding Automation in 2024

According to the 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the annual employee turnover in 2020 was 57.3%. One way to look at that statistic is that companies are conducting an increasing amount of employee offboarding processes. 

The employee offboarding process is automatable. Yet, only 5% have fully automated it. 

This article will explore the top 5 benefits companies can gain from automating their offboarding process. 

1. Systematize your offboarding process 

A prerequisite to automation is a thorough understanding of how a process works. Process intelligence tools, such as process mining or process mapping, help you get an as-is understanding of the current state of your process. 

From there on, you can use different automation tools to systematically automate your offboarding process on a rule-based basis. The benefit of understanding how your processes currently work and laying the groundwork for a step-by-step process for the software bots to follow is that your company will have a clearly-defined onboarding process for both the employee and the employer to follow. 

2. Secure confidential information 

Outgoing employees taking the company’s confidential information with them is one way that intellectual property (IP) theft happens. One way to reduce its likelihood is to restrict the outgoing employee’s access to the information. 

Companies today use multiple business applications, with employees naturally having login credentials to do their jobs. Making sure that said credentials are taken back from an outgoing employee is key to keeping the data secured. 

The challenge is ensuring that access to everything is blocked.

An offboarding software can be programmed to restrict access to all ERP applications, email accounts, databases, and more in a rule-based manner. 

3. Archive employee documents efficiently 

The outgoing employee’s replacement should have access to what his/her predecessor had been working on. 

Let’s say a new accountant is replacing the old one. The former needs to, for instance, have access to the quarterly reports the latter had been preparing prior to his/her offboarding. 

Archiving all the relevant documents in one location to ensure operational efficiency is key for the new employee’s onboarding process. 

An RPA-powered offboarding software can be programmed, via screen-scraping or recording, to archive all necessary documents in one convenient location should an employee decide to leave the company. This will make it easier that there would be no missing material for the new employee to work with. 

4. Communicate the departure 

To ensure that the to-be vacant position is filled as soon as possible for business continuity, the subject matter should be communicated promptly and clearly to all relevant parties.   

For instance, if the head of your IT department is leaving, the recruitment department should be notified of that at least two weeks in advance in order to start looking for a replacement. And the key to that is communicating the matter to the recruitment department. 

Or let’s say an employee has been let go for violating a company policy. That matter should be transparently shared with all current employees to let them know what rule had exactly been violated, and the consequences. 

Offboarding software applications have in-built messaging capabilities that allow for communications, specific to this subject matter, to efficiently and transparently take place. 

5. Eliminate guesswork

Especially if a company has employees on different contracts – full-time, part-time, freelancer, etc. – it might be difficult to calculate their individual compensation prior to offboarding. 

Offboarding software can be linked by API to exchange employee information with other applications to establish:

• The department they worked with, 
• Their role,
• Contract type, 
• Date of the last invoice, 
• Severance package calculation, and more, in a rule-based and accurate manner with minimal manual intervention. 

For more on automation

To learn more about other use cases of automation in the workplace, read:

• Top 5 RPA Use Cases & Applications in Accounting
• Top 5 Benefits of Contract Automation
• 4 Ways to Improve Your Business with Self-Service Automation

If you believe your business would benefit from adopting an automation solution, we have data-driven lists of vendors prepared for various use cases.

We can help you choose the right tool for your business: