Employee offboarding checklist: 5 steps for an effective exit (+ free offboarding checklist template)

Finola Rance -

It's normal for HR teams to spend a lot of time and resources building an effective onboarding process, but a lot of people don’t realise that offboarding is just as important.

Research shows that employees who have a positive offboarding experience and leave on good terms are almost three times more likely to recommend your company to potential job prospects than those who have a negative, or even neutral, experience.

My experience as Charlie’s People and Talent Manager has taught me that the offboarding process is vital for:

  • A strong hiring strategy
  • Staying compliant
  • Gathering genuine, honest feedback from exiting employees
  • Ensuring the rest of the team continues to do their best work
  • Avoiding jumping on and off the hiring bandwagon
  • Keeping good people in the long run.

So to help you, I’m going to share what our offboarding checklist looks like at Charlie (after many iterations over the last few years!). I hope it is helpful to build your own.

And if you’re in a rush, you can go straight to our employee offboarding checklist template.

The 5 steps of your offboarding checklist

A team member’s leaving date is just one point in time — the actual offboarding process starts much earlier, and extends up to a month after your employee has left.

At Charlie, we split employee offboarding into five steps:

  • When the team member announces they’re leaving
  • Two weeks out from their leaving date
  • Their last week
  • Their last day (and the day after)
  • Next payday.

I’ll share the employee offboarding checklists we use at Charlie, and show you how easy it is to automate offboarding through our HR software.

But first, let’s go through each step in detail… 

Step 1 - Agree on a leaving date and let everyone know 

When someone decides to resign, the first person to know will typically be their line manager. What happens then?

Offboarding Checklist - step 1:

  • Agree on a leaving date
  • Send offboarding email to the departing team member (just as you would send a welcome email to a new employee, you also need to properly acknowledge when someone’s leaving)
  • Line manager communicates resignation to the rest of the company

The priority here is to agree on a leaving date. This may require some negotiation, especially if someone wants to leave before the end of their notice period.

At Charlie, we’re generally open to negotiating a date that works for both parties — just make sure there is enough time for the leaver to prepare a detailed handover (a handover leaving template is really helpful here), and document anything that will need to be delegated to the rest of the team. (Note: this could take at least three months for someone in a high-responsibility position.)

Another detail you’ll have to sort as soon as possible is the offboarding email. This outlines what the employee’s final weeks at work will look like.

It’s a good idea to have an offboarding email template to hand, as then you won’t need to write an email from scratch whenever someone resigns. We’ve got one that you can download for free!👇.

Now you’ve got to let the rest of your team know… 

We don’t like to keep resignations hidden at Charlie — we feel it’s counterproductive. If you break the news as soon as the decision is final, it will give everyone time to prepare and reduce the potential for office gossip. 

In a small business, the departure of a popular colleague can have a big ripple effect — so managing it transparently and professionally is vital. The employee offboarding checklist guides you through the process step-by-step to ensure communication is smooth and consistent, and nothing important is missed. 

At Charlie, we have the leaver’s line manager make an announcement at a team meeting. This gives everyone the chance to pass on their congratulations and ensures that all communication about anyone leaving the company is the same. 

To wrap up this stage, here’s the mini offboarding checklist we use at Charlie for the days immediately following a resignation:

Step 2 - Transfer knowledge and future workload

Arguably the most important part of the offboarding process, this is where the employee, their manager, and the HR team come together to make sure all knowledge and company assets are handed over, and all the compliance boxes are ticked.

At this point, we use our own HR software to create different offboarding checklists for the leaver, their manager, and the HR team. This allows us to delegate tasks to the right people and keep tabs on progress through the Charlie dashboard — extremely handy! (The system also sends automatic reminders when a deadline is approaching, so we don’t miss anything.)

This is what our three checklists for Step 2 look like:

Offboarding Checklist - Step 2 (HR/ops team):

  • Organise laptop and equipment collection
  • Prepare to revoke access to office
  • Confirm leaving date with finance to prepare last payroll
  • Book an exit interview
  • Ask leaver if they would like leaving drinks, and organise if yes

Offboarding Checklist - Step 2 (manager):

  • Ensure the leaver has sent their letter of resignation with Human Resources cc’d in (typically as an email)
  • Write a few words to go in a company-wide email to celebrate the leaver and their contribution
  • Oversee the creation of the leaver’s handover document

Offboarding Checklist - Step 2 (leaver):

  • Prepare a comprehensive handover document and run through with team
  • Hand over any software or apps to a relevant member of the team
  • Ask for a letter of recommendation from manager

The role of the HR or operations team here is varied. There are several tasks you don’t want to leave to the last minute, like figuring out the best way to get the leaver’s laptop back (alongside any other company property), and preparing their last payroll — these things always take more time than you’d think!

On the other hand, the line manager’s most important task is to oversee the creation of the handover document. This must include:

  • Any outstanding work that needs to be picked up 
  • Introductions/contact info to/for anyone outside the business they regularly work with
  • Progress reports/updates/information that could be useful
  • Access/login info for any software/platforms they’re responsible for 

Ideally, the handover document should be ready at least one week before the employee’s leaving date. That way, their manager and their team will have the time to review and ask any questions (or for clarification). 

Step 3 - Conduct an exit interview and sort out the paperwork

Your team member is now in their last week at your company: it’s time to wrap up the offboarding process.

Offboarding Checklist - Step 3:

  • Conduct the exit interview
  • Get answers to the last handover questions
  • Share instructions on how to wipe laptop
  • Circulate a leaving card (can be virtual)

The last week is the ideal time for an exit interview, as they’ll likely have detached from the day-to-day of their role and should have some useful feedback to share. 

At Charlie, we always let our leavers choose who to have their exit interview with: either me (People and Talent Manager), their line manager, or someone from the Leadership Team. This is to ensure they can be as honest as possible with their feedback.

The old saying “people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses” frequently rings true, so it’s a good idea to offer alternative exit interviewers. 

During this final week, it’s also important to ask any last-minute questions regarding the handover document. So make sure their team and any direct reports are confident they have everything they need — it’s much harder to get answers once they’re out the door! 

Another essential bit of admin during this step of the offboarding process is for the leaving employee to wipe their laptop (and work phone if they have one). This removes all data on the hard drive so that the computer’s ready for a new employee when the time comes.

Unless you expect your team member to do any actual work on their last day, I’d recommend asking them to wipe their laptop the day before. The process can take a few hours, so you don’t want to leave it to the very last moment.

And the final thing to tick off during their last week is to send a card around so their colleagues can say goodbye and wish them luck. This doesn’t need to be a physical card — there are many products out there that help you create virtual ones if your team is remote.

Step 4 - Collect all equipment and revoke access

If you’ve been following our employee offboarding checklist then you won’t have much left to do on your employee’s last day.

All that remains is to:

  • Collect all company equipment (or arrange delivery if remote)
  • Revoke office access
  • Set up an email redirect
  • … And give them a proper sendoff!

A quick note on the email redirect: if the leaving team member was customer-facing or generally received a lot of emails from outside of the business, this redirect is super important. You don’t want to risk missing out on messages from important contacts or potential customers.

Your employee’s last day is also the moment to publicly recognise, one final time, their contribution to the business and wish them all the best for the future. At Charlie, we have their line manager say a few words at an all-team meeting.

And then it’s time for leaving drinks!

But the offboarding process doesn’t end here — at least not for whoever’s responsible for HR.

The next day, you’ll need to ensure that:

  • your former employee has been removed from all software
  • you’ve updated all permissions and passwords
  • all files have been transferred over to a manager (if you use Google Suite or anything like Dropbox).

As you can see, there’s a lot to remember! If you’re worried about leaving something out you might find it helpful to use an interactive offboarding checklist tool like CharlieHR.  Charlie’s great for small businesses because you can assign different offboarding tasks to different people, so nothing is forgotten (for example, a developer might be responsible for removing the employee from the About page on the website, while a marketing manager would revoke access to Google Drive).

With Charlie’s automated employee offboarding checklists, you have full visibility of who’s responsible for what and can easily track their progress via the dashboard.

If you want to see how our offboarding checklists work in practice, you can trial Charlie for free for 7 days.

Step 5 - Sort final paycheck, send P45, and provide information about share options

Ticking off the last couple of jobs is always a great feeling and an offboarding checklist is no different!

Now your employee has officially moved on, all that’s left to do is ensure they receive their final pay (with any adjustments for holiday they didn’t take) and their P45.

And if you offer share options, you should also check what your former employee would like to do with them now they’ve left.

Charlie’s complete employee offboarding checklist

I hope you’ve found this article helpful for better understanding offboarding and improving your own internal processes with employee offboarding checklists.

You can download our full offboarding checklist as a Google Sheets template and have everything we’ve talked about above on one page.

Professional and positive offboarding is important for your business and for your team. And Charlie can help you by:

Now you’ve improved offboarding, you may also want to review how you onboard your new employees.

We’ve got free onboarding resources that you can access anytime, or you can start a free trial and automate the entire onboarding (and offboarding) process in just a few clicks. 

Because looking after your people means looking after your business.