Why a Positive Offboarding Experience Matters More Than Ever

This resource first appeared in issue #70 on 16 Apr 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Offboarding, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing

Why a Positive Offboarding Experience Matters More Than Ever - NOBL

As a rule, people won’t retire from their jobs with you. It’s always good to be prepared for any given team member to leave (make sure everything’s always documented, use one-on-ones to have a good understanding of what everyone’s working on, use techniques like pair programming/PR reviews or talks and demos to disseminate knowledge.

The post on NOBL makes the following suggestions:

Make sure your off-boarding checklist still makes sense in a post-pandemic world (how do they get equipment back to the department?)
Acknowledge the discomfort of team members who are being left behind
Have a celebration moment for the departing team member - maybe at a regularly scheduled meeting, maybe something separate. Celebrate your team member going on to the next part of their career
Consider a physical memento
Make sure you get needed knowledge from them before they leave

It may seem odd to celebrate the team member leaving, but basically none of your team members are going to keep their current job with you until retirement. They will all move on, and new team members will join in their place, that’s good and healthy, and we want to mark these moments like all life transitions - celebratory, even if a little melancholy.

To the list they provided, I’d add: make sure you have the documents - job description, evaluation framework, interview questions - in place to be able to post a job ad for a replacement for anyone on a moment’s notice.