How to Build Better Onboarding and Offboarding Processes for Your Team

How does your business handle the onboarding and offboarding of employees? Depending on your processes, it might involve completing tasks or wrestling with new technology. Whether you like it or not, managing the onboarding and offboarding of employees is a critical part of any business operation from both a security and operational standpoint. Let’s go over how you can make them better.

How to Onboard a New Employee

Your onboarding process should have two goals: to bring your new team member into a welcoming environment and to get them into a productive state as quickly as possible. You’ll want to be prepared with the technology they need to ensure this goes off without a hitch.

What You’ll Need:

• Hardware - All devices, from the workstation your employee will use to the peripherals they need, should be configured and ready for them at their workspace.
• Accounts - Any logins should be created and tested before your new hire arrives, from network access to email and software licensing.
• Permissions - To ensure your new team member can hit the ground running, they should have access to everything they need as defined by their role, nothing more, nothing less.
• Training - Any new employee will need to be introduced to your company, its policies and culture, as well as its technology and the security expectations you’ve established.

With these elements prepared, you’ll be ready to welcome your new team member into a productive environment and get them acclimated to their job duties and responsibilities with ease. Your new employee can get right into it and begin offering the ROI you know they can.

What happens when that team member wants to leave your organization for a different option, or to retire? This is where offboarding comes in, and it’s vital that you ensure this process is done correctly.

How to Offboard an Existing Employee

Your goal for offboarding an employee is simple: establish closure. This means that you have full control over your data and other resources/assets, ensuring that your departing employee doesn’t walk out the door with it all. Here are the steps you can take to work toward this goal.

What To Do:

• Rescind Permissions - Make sure that all of a departing user’s accounts are fully disabled and deactivated, from email to cloud apps to your VPN.
• Transfer Data - Migrate ownership of all files and email contents to a manager.
• Retrieve Assets - Collect and inventory all company property, from laptops, phones, MFA tokens, and other physical assets.
• Double-check - Perform a final audit to confirm that no points of access were missed during the offboarding process.

Again, this is critical. You don’t want sensitive data to stay in the hands of employees who no longer have a need or use for it. This significantly opens up the opportunity for data breaches in the future and can become a serious risk for your organization if left unchecked.

We’ll Help You Build Better Onboarding and Offboarding Processes

Now you know the tasks you need to carry out whenever someone joins or leaves your organization, but how do you actually build these practices? That’s where we come in. Preferred can help you establish and follow through on these processes so you can be confident in their success. Learn more today by calling us at 708-781-7110.