Employee On/Offboarding: Bridging the Department Gap with Documentation

Onboarding and offboarding are, in essence, two sides of the same coin. While onboarding focuses on smoothly integrating new hires into the company, offboarding ensures a stress-free exit. While both functions play a critical role in the seamless operation of an organization, the important question is — who really owns the onboarding/offboarding process in a company? Well, the right answer is, everyone.

Onboarding and offboarding of employees requires coordination between multiple departments including HR, IT, facilities management, security and more. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to bridge the departmental gap when organizing the onboarding or offboarding process.

To see how you can streamline your onboarding and offboarding process with IT Glue, request a demo.

Creating Departmental Cooperation

Departmental cooperation puts the company first and creates a seamless process that ensures quick completion of tasks. When departments don’t cooperate with each other, it results in a chaotic process that becomes difficult to sort out. Documentation is the best solution to establish departmental cooperation and prevent unnecessary chaos in the onboarding or offboarding process.

To make sure cross-departmental cooperation doesn’t turn into a messy affair, you need to come up with clear guidelines describing the role of each department in the process. For instance, the HR department is typically responsible for setting up the payroll, communicating benefits, welcoming the employees, etc.

When you document every step clearly, it eliminates confusion between teams and ensures a smooth handoff from one team to another. To make sure your documentation process doesn’t turn into a nightmare, you need the right tools that can automate the process and boost efficiency.

Establish Processes in Advance

From an IT perspective, onboarding or offboarding involves a lot of tasks, such as setting up workstations, providing necessary access and installing required software while onboarding, or closing accounts and retrieving assets while offboarding, to name a few. All these tasks need to be completed in a step-by-step manner so as not to overwhelm employees, regardless of whether they are new hires or whether they are exiting the company.

This is only possible if you have established clear guidelines on what actions need to be taken and by whom. When the processes are well documented in the form of standard operating procedures (SOPs), checklists, training resources, etc., it provides clear accountability on the actions to be performed. Having a tool that brings them all together is vital to ensuring onboarding or offboarding success.

Benefits of Documentation in Onboarding/Offboarding

In addition to routine information management, documentation can benefit the onboarding and offboarding processes in the following ways:

• Onboarding: Documentation helps create a traceable system where everyone is accountable for the actions they need to perform. Training resources, SOPs, SLAs, checklists, etc., can be easily shared with multiple departments to ensure consistency in the process. Most importantly, it helps the new hires get integrated into the company as soon as possible and get productive instantly. It also reduces mistakes in the process and boosts efficiency.
• Offboarding: Offboarding is more than just a routine administrative process. It has a lot to do with the security of the organization following the exit of an employee. This means various departments must come together to revoke access, retrieve company assets, ensure knowledge transfer, hold exit interviews and more. This process could easily turn messy without clearly documented procedures. When there are guidelines on priority tasks, you can apply them meticulously and ensure a stress-free offboarding for exiting employees.

Summary

Onboarding and offboarding have become especially complex in recent times due to remote or hybrid work environments. However, they don’t have to be. With proper planning and clearly documented guidelines, you can easily overcome these challenges and standardize the process.

Conducting regular reviews is also important to ensure process effectiveness. You need to analyze your processes periodically and make improvements as and when required.

To implement a systematic process to onboard or offboard your employees, download our free checklist.

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