How to remain smart and secure when employees leave

When employees leave your business, whether good circumstances or not, it is important to protect your organization when it happens. Having a detailed onboarding and offboarding process for your employees is essential and will protect your organization in many ways.  Here are some ideas to include when developing your processes.

• First and foremost, conduct exit interviews, whether the employee is leaving on their own terms, or you are terminating their employment. Remaining professional and upfront will help a lot. If you are dealing with security and privacy matters, make sure to debrief them on what they can and cannot share with the general public.
• Retrieve company devices, mobile devices, backup disks, USB’s, etc. Your IT team should have detailed records of all inventory distributed to employees. Data breaches are most often a result of lost or stolen devices.
• Deactivate their email. Have a process in place where former employee’s emails are forwarded to a supervisor or another person on the team. You don’t want former employees to have access to their email accounts and sensitive business information after they depart.
• Change and update any usernames and passwords that they may have had access to. This includes social media and other websites they were using as well as financial accounts or bank accounts.
• Retrieve any key cards, credit cards, or employee identification cards.
• For BYOD devices and remote access, you’ll need to wipe all corporate information off of these and revoke access.

Whether you have to let an employee go, they quit, or are just leaving on good terms, you have to protect your company and its information. Having a good onboarding/offboarding process will help ensure that everything goes smoothly. It will also help keep your business organized and running smoothly.