The following processes are required when offboarding a team member.

Payroll

The employee’s status in the payroll accounts must be updated to reflect their ending of employment.

If an employee’s final day does not coincide with the final day in a pay period, payroll will need to be modified.

Benefits

Benefits providers will need to be notified of the ending of employment so proper offboarding and eventual termination of benefits is handled in accordance with the law.

Transitioning

The leaving employee should spend their remaining time wrapping up work, documenting knowledge, training successor(s), and passing the baton. The goal is to have a smooth transition for the rest of the team, our partners, and customers.

Wrapping up work

The employee should finish any works-in-progress that they have started (software features, graphic assets, communications, etc). If a work cannot be completed due to insufficient time, it should be communicated that the work will be abandoned or needs to be passed to someone else.

Documenting knowledge

The employee should spend time documenting and sharing any tribal knowledge they have acquired (workflows, helper scripts, pro-tips, gotchya’s, contacts, resources etc). This will help the rest of the team or a new team member efficiently handle the employee’s responsibilities when they are gone.

Training successor(s)

The employee should spend as much time as possible with any successor(s) to bring them up to speed so as few things fall through the cracks. Oftentimes this may be existing team members.

Passing the baton

In addition to handing off any work that cannot be completed, passing the baton to successor(s) may include making introductions to key contacts (eg: an account rep for one our service providers) or granting access to resources (eg: database or service).

Accounts and access

Immediately upon the end of the employee’s final day, their access to company accounts and other resources shall be removed and/or limited. Refer to our current list of vendors to thoroughly remove access, also taking into account the these other forms of access:

  • Google drive folder permissions
  • Social media credentials
  • Security camera access
  • Production and staging server tokens
  • Forum titles and permissions
  • Web app account credentials
  • Warehouse and other physical location keys