IT Offboarding Checklist: Managing Departing Employees Smoothly and Securely

We all know how critical efficient onboarding is for getting new employees up to speed and fully prepared to tackle daily tasks. However, offboarding employees is equally important, especially when it comes to IT. 

Here, we’ll cover everything you need to know about IT offboarding to create a smooth transition for an employee’s departure while protecting sensitive information. We’ll also include a simple checklist and best practices. 

What is IT Offboarding?

IT offboarding involves developing a smooth, streamlined process for offboarding a departing employee so that you collect devices, disable user accounts, and terminate access to internal systems while maintaining high security. 

Using IT assets like desktops, laptops, and other devices is common for the vast number of today’s employees. Besides that, most also have multiple user accounts and access to internal systems like CRM software, SaaS management tools, and company databases. 

Effective IT offboarding is important because it: 

• Directly addresses the information technology aspect of employee offboarding
• Increases efficiency and consistency from start to finish
• Reduces the threat of security issues such as a data breach or ex-employees gaining unauthorized access
• Helps your organization stay compliant and prevent legal complications 
• Checks every box on your checklist so nothing is overlooked

Just like the onboarding process aims at getting a new employee plugged into your system and ready to perform their job with minimal friction, IT offboarding is designed to help remove a departing employee while protecting your company’s assets and keeping your data intact.

IT Offboarding Checklist Template

☑️Have HR notify your IT department of an employee’s exact departure date

☑️Identify every company asset and piece of company property that needs to be retrieved

☑️Identify the platforms and internal systems an employee has access to

☑️Revoke an employee’s access to software and systems

☑️Retrieve IT assets (this can be done in-house or through third-party IT management services)

☑️Transfer company data to a secure platform like Google Drive

☑️Conduct an exit interview and gather employee feedback

☑️Sanitize data on returned devices

☑️Have your IT team notify HR when an employee has officially departed

☑️Document any issues that arise throughout the process and use them to refine your checklist

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Step-by-Step IT Offboarding Process and Security Guidelines

1. Notify Your IT Team of Employee Departure

As soon as your HR team confirms that a team member will be leaving, the IT offboarding process begins.

During this first stage, HR should officially notify your IT department of the departing employee so they can initiate the IT offboarding process. 

Some specific offboarding tasks include identifying the employee’s final working day, the IT assets you need to retrieve, and what platforms/internal systems they have access to. 

2. Revoke Software and System Access

A big part of identity governance and keeping your organization secure during employee departure is promptly ending their access to sensitive company information — mainly, internal systems such as CRM software, SaaS platforms, networks, and databases. 

After there’s been a notification of departure, your IT department will want to systematically revoke software and system access to every app, platform, or database the employee had access to during their tenure. 

You should be thorough about a departing employee’s access and go through each point of access one by one to ensure nothing is missed. 

3. Retrieve Company Assets

Next, you need to collect any technology assets a departing employee used. Common examples include desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, IT office equipment, or any other company owned devices on your checklist. 

Retrieving company assets for in-house employees is pretty straightforward. Just have an IT team member collect assets while ensuring everything is accounted for. However, it can be a little trickier with remote employees. 

That’s why many companies choose to use a third-party professional like allwhere, where you can use a laptop retrieval service. With this service, we handle the end-to-end logistics while making it simple and hassle-free to offboard employees. 

You can learn more about using this type of offboarding solution to get equipment back from employees in this related post. 

4. Manage Data and Perform a Knowledge Transfer

After you’ve gathered every IT asset and revoked software/system access, it’s time to preserve the data to keep it intact. For example, this could include transferring files to Google Drive or archiving emails that contain important information. 

Always double-check your checklist to ensure that you’ve gotten all critical data and nothing has been overlooked. 

Then, the data can be transferred to the next person during employee onboarding. Or if you have a boomerang employee situation, the data can be transferred back to them. 

5. Conduct Exit Interviews and Gather Feedback

At the end of the day, the goal of IT offboarding is to efficiently remove a leaving employee from your company system while going out on good terms and strengthening your company culture.

Like any other part of the offboarding process, IT offboarding should be iterative, where you continually look for ways to optimize it. A great way to achieve this is by conducting exit interviews, where you see what worked well and what needs improving. 

Then, armed with this information, you’ll know exactly which elements to fine-tune in your employee offboarding checklist. 

6. Wipe Data of Returned Devices

The final element of effective offboarding is to protect sensitive information by sanitizing devices before they’re reused by a new employee. 

According to UC San Diego, “Data may be considered sensitive for a number of reasons, including classification as:

• Trade secret/proprietary information
• User ID/password combinations
• Financial information
• Personal information”

Some ways to go about wiping data include performing a factory reset and cleaning hard drives. And if there’s a hard drive that you won’t ever use again, you’ll want to physically destroy it for maximum security. 

IT Offboarding Best Practices

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

“A standard operating procedure is a set of step-by-step instructions for performing a routine activity,” explains TechTarget. “SOPs should be followed the same way every time to guarantee that the organization remains consistent and in compliance with industry regulations and business standards.”

SOPs are used in a wide variety of business areas and are extremely helpful for IT employee offboarding. They allow you to develop a systematized process so you can offboard employees quickly, smoothly, and consistently while reducing any hiccups along the way. 

Your SOP should cover every step of the offboarding checklist mentioned above and should be periodically updated as new changes are made. 

Ideally, you’ll have convenient access to your SOP through a centralized digital resource so you can easily share it with new hires, and existing employees can reference it as needed. 

Training Sessions

Given that the quality of your IT offboarding process impacts so many areas of your business (security, employee experience, culture, and more), your IT team should undergo routine training. 

During these sessions, you’ll want to focus specifically on:

• Proper offboarding strategies for in-house employees and those with remote access
• Your employee offboarding checklist
• Security protocol
• How to identify threats
• The device retrieval process
• Data transfer and storage techniques
• Optimizing institutional knowledge

Interdepartmental Cross-Training

Effective IT employee offboarding requires different teams to be on the same page at all times. 

Most notably, your HR and IT teams need to be in close collaboration from start to finish. But it can also involve your legal, finance, and security teams as well. 

Therefore, interdepartmental cross-training is encouraged, as it can improve communication, reduce offboarding time, create a better employee experience, lower costs, and reduce friction. 

When doing interdepartmental cross-training, be clear about the specific goals you want to achieve, create a realistic training schedule, and make refinements as you analyze the results. You can then use your findings to enhance your checklist.

Privacy and Security

In 2023 alone, nearly half of SMBs experienced at least one cybersecurity incident, and 26% experienced more than one. 

Given the prevalence of cyber threats, protecting sensitive data is of the utmost concern, and you should have strict security measures in place to lower your risk level. 

Again, this is mainly done by revoking access post-departure, transferring sensitive data, wiping data from returned devices, and promoting security training among your IT staff. 

Drastically Simplify IT Offboarding with allwhere 

Numbers vary, but on average, about 18% of the workforce leaves each year. That’s why it’s critical to have an effective employee offboarding process in place — one that’s streamlined and fires on all cylinders. 

There are two main options.

You can either do it in-house, which can be complicated from a logistics standpoint. Or you can outsource IT offboarding to a professional third party like allwhere, who knows the ins and outs and can handle the process end-to-end for a hands-off experience.

Our main offboarding specialty is laptop retrieval, which can be done once or on an ongoing basis in bulk. With laptop retrieval, everything an employee needs arrives in a box. All they have to do is read the instructions, pack it up, attach the prepaid return label, and ship it back. 

We provide real-time updates every step of the way and handle employee communication. We also send reminders and provide updates as they come. The average retrieval time for US businesses is less than a week. 

Learn more about IT offboarding with allwhere here.