More Tools for Offboarding Employees

An IT Team without an Office

To accommodate growing remote teams, IT Managers must make sweeping changes to their procedures in order to track and administrate devices. Just like onboarding these employees, offboarding remote employees offers a sweeping set of challenges that IT Teams must overcome. 

More than anything, having a remote workforce means coordinating retrieval of devices across a physical distance, rather than just grabbing the device in-office.  While offboarding remote users may be intimidating, Oomnitza can help ease the pressure and help IT teams keep track of these assets as they make their voyage back into IT’s hands.

Deciding on an Offboarding Policy

Before processes and automations can be created to meet your new remote offboarding needs, it’s important to decide on just what your offboarding policy is, and how you’ll be reclaiming devices from remote users.

As COVID-19 pushes IT teams into work-from-home-mode, Oomnitza has encountered a variety of changes to offboarding policies. The most prevalent of these, however, is the retention of an in-office skeleton crew. Typically, this is a small team that only goes to the office when shipments of gear from offboarded users come in. 

While this approach was driven by COVID-19, we believe that it applies beyond that as well. The pandemic has highlighted the utility of a centralized and cohesive IT Team in ensuring the integrity of assets. While some central work may be necessary, it can be streamlined and simplified by using Oomnitza to automate away the extraneous work to make IT’s role in the process acute and tactical. 

An Offboarding Policy doesn’t need to be complicated. While each organization will have its own intricacies, at least with regards to retrieving their assets. An example could include:

• Notify Employee of Assets to be Reclaimed, and when they should be returned by.
• Provide Employee with Shipping Instructions to return their devices (including a trackable shipping label).
• Assign an IT Team member to reclaim those assets when delivered.
• Collect the offboarded Employee’s assets when expected.

Other steps can and should be added including revoking SSO, VPN, SaaS, and even device access. 

Managing Offboarding Status Using Nested Checklists

A common best practice for managing employee offboarding is to use Offboarding Checklists. While these tend to be largely HR Focused, as IT teams grow, they’re confronted with more and more offboarding tasks, which can be effectively managed through an offboarding checklist. This can help ensure an offboarding process that’s more pleasant for departing employees as well as the IT team. 

In Oomnitza, an excellent way to create offboarding checklists is to nest them beneath the offboarding status by using Oomnitza’s relational fields feature.

Creating an Offboarding Checklist

To start off, make sure you’ve designated an Offboarding Status among the options for your user statuses. This may look different between organizations and User integrations, but for this example, I’ll be using “Offboarding” as the status.

You’ll also need to designate the items on your Offboarding checklist. Once again, these will vary between organizations, but we’ll use some standard IT Offboarding items for this article:

• Notify the Offboarding employee of Assets to return.
• Notify IT of which assets need to be collected. 
• Collect assets from Offboarding employee.
• Deprovision Offboarded Employee’s software licenses. 

By making these relational, you can hide them when unnecessary, only to appear when the user begins offboarding, as seen below.

Automating Your Offboarding Checklist

By tracking these fields in Oomnitza, you can (when appropriate) allow workflows to mark them off automatically, and further, create exception reports to track users who were not offboarded properly.

Here’s an example workflow that utilizes Oomnitza’s Offboard Assets, Offboard Software, and Approval Blocks to perform a good chunk of a user’s offboarding in Oomnitza while prompting an IT Manager to complete the tasks in the Offboarding Checklist. 

While this is a complex example, it demonstrates how the flexibility of Oomnitza’s workflow engine can be used to create intricate automations that are custom-tailored to your process. For questions on setting up these workflows, please reach out to [e-mail] or to your customer success manager.

Creating Exception Reports

In addition to having the checkboxes as search-and-filterable fields available within Oomnitza’s People Module, they provide a handy springboard for creating exception reports. 

Be creating a saved search for users in the “Offboarded” or “Deprovisioned” status that have any of the aforementioned boxes Unchecked, IT managers can keep track of users that have not been successfully offboarded, which allows them to take employee-specific steps to retrieve assets and de-provision users.

More Offboarding Tips

The amount of things an IT team can do using Oomnitza is nigh-limitless. Here are a few more handy functions that Oomnitza offers to help offboard members of a remote team.

Tracking Device Check-Ins

In addition to automating the retrieval of offboarded assets, it’s important to know what’s going on with those assets as they’re in the retrieval process. In a local office, offboarded devices can be reclaimed immediately, limiting the user’s access after termination.

While MDM systems can often revoke access from the device, it’s always valuable to have a back-up. Many of Oomnitza’s MDM integrations can report on check-in dates. Workflows in Oomnitza can be used to notify IT Managers if Offboarded Devices are still checking in, allowing them to investigate any anomalies. 

Offboarding En Masse

No one likes layoffs, but as companies grow, they can become inevitable. Economies change, goals change, corporate vision changes, and teams can become obsolete. While all of the above processes can be useful when offboarding multiple users simultaneously, other features in Oomnitza can simplify the process even further. 

Oomnitza’s bulk editing feature allows you to make changes to multiple users or assets at once. This can simplify their change of status, and allow you to drive your workflow automations through Oomnitza itself for large sets of users, rather than wait for updates to be made in source systems.