What to Do When an Employee Leaves

You will need to set some lightweight processes for how you manage people inside the business as well as those outside the business. This includes people who are hired, as contractor or permanently, as well as those who leave.

Managing new starters is easier than managing leavers. You want to start small on access, and add over time. If you run into problems where they don’t have enough, it is less risky to open access up rather than try to claw it back when you notice them (accidentally or intentionally) misusing this access.

Leavers are a bit harder, and it helps to have the process clear beforehand. The best tool at your disposal here is a quick onboarding and offboarding checklist. You can store it anywhere—in a task management tool, or on a document stored on your computer. So long as it is something easy for you to pick up, create a unique copy for a specific person, and save it for your records, it should work fine.

On that checklist for offboarding, you want to include the following steps:

1. Disabling their main email provider account

2. Collecting any work devices and physical access cards/keys they used

3. Removing them from the team password manager

4. Removing or blocking their device on your email provider’s list of devices in use

5. Rotating any passwords for the shared accounts, tools, or devices they had access to, and re-storing those in the team password manager

This list will obviously depend on what tools, devices, and access you gave them. You can also tell how hard this list would be to tackle if you didn’t have things like an inventory of tools, accounts, and devices used in your business.

In order to run a business, we need to trust our team and outsiders to do work on behalf of the business. Having lightweight processes like these can help you keep that trust in check, and make sure that it is revoked when it is no longer needed. Reviewing your users every few months can help catch any that slipped through the cracks.