Prepare for Employee Turnover with a Foolproof Exit Checklist

One of the most dreaded situations in the modern office is the resignation of experienced talent. It’s always sad to say goodbye to a colleague and friend… under the right circumstances. What would happen if an angry employee left your company and used their privileges to wreck havoc on your IT?

If you’ve taken proper precautions to ensure your former employees can’t sabotage your network and steal your data, you’re golden. However, this simply isn’t the case with a lot of companies, mainly because they don’t count on their former coworkers backstabbing them. This isn’t the entire issue at hand. Even if a former employee doesn’t intentionally take data from your business upon resignation, they could get hacked in the future, leaving sensitive data exposed. The best way to avoid employees walking off with corporate data is to take proper precautions, starting before they walk out your door.

Perform an Exit Interview
Besides getting the opportunity to discuss why they’re leaving the company, conducting an exit interview is a good time to iron out details that shouldn’t be left unchecked. This is a good time to talk about what accounts the exiting employee has access to, what devices they’ve borrowed from the company, important documents they might possess, and how to get in touch with them after they leave.

Take Back Any Company-Provided Devices
Once you’ve identified that your employee is indeed leaving the organization, you need to collect the devices they’ve borrowed from the company, like laptops, mobile devices, and storage devices like USBs or hard drives. This helps to ensure that you don’t let corporate data slip through the cracks. Collecting these devices ensures that you’re the one in control of your data, which mitigates the chance of the data being compromised, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

Promptly Change Email Passwords and Remote Access Accounts
For obvious reasons, you need to revoke access to their email accounts. This helps to prevent them from accessing information that they shouldn’t have access to following their departure from your company.

Change All Relevant Passwords
You never know just how many passwords an employee might walk out of your company with, especially if they’re saved in their personal mobile device’s browser cache or they use a password manager. This is why it’s important to make sure that all passwords are changed. If an employee were to get hacked, or decide that they don’t agree with their dismissal from your organization, it could put your data at risk of being compromised.

Wipe Mobile Devices
If your network can dish out security policies to mobile devices that gain access to company email, you will want to make sure you remotely wipe your accounts. This is something you would have needed to set up prior, but it prevents the user from walking away with their email in their pocket. Even if your former employee isn’t a threat, if the device is lost or stolen it could come back to bite you.

Warn Your IT
As always, you need to keep IT in the loop so they can keep an eye out for any suspicious activity concerning the former employee. In fact, your IT team should be entirely involved in the exit process to ensure that no stones are left unturned.

Overall, most of these steps are fairly obvious, but some businesses fail to follow through with them for a number of reasons. Some don’t have the resources, while others might simply forget one or two key steps when letting an employee go. Whatever your reason, Preferred can assist your team by providing the handiwork necessary to ensure your data is as secure as possible following the resignation of an employee. Give us a call at 708-781-7110 to learn more.