Employee Offboarding

Seven months after the sales manager left Northgate Retail, his account signed in from a coffee shop and downloaded the customer list. Nobody had disabled it. HR had sent the leaver notice to a mailbox that had itself belonged to a leaver. The manager had assumed IT did these things automatically, and IT had assumed somebody would tell them. The laptop had come back, eventually, in a carrier bag. The account had not, because accounts do not come back in bags. The investigation afterwards found four more live accounts for people who had left that year. One was still receiving the weekly payroll report.

This series is about the exit as a security event handled by a help desk. It covers why offboarding is a security ticket first and what a sloppy one leaves behind. It covers the offboarding checklist in the only order that is safe, which is disable first and delete later. Then come same-day and immediate exits, where the minutes matter and the discretion matters more. It covers getting the equipment back from an office leaver and from one who has never been in the building. It covers the leaver's data and mailbox, and the manager who wants everything. And it covers the leaver audit, which is the quarterly reconciliation that finds the accounts nobody disabled. The starter gets a welcome. The leaver gets a checklist. Both are kindness.

Articles in This Series

• Why Offboarding Is a Security Ticket First
  What a sloppy exit leaves behind, and the leaver who still had access months later. Covers the desk's role against HR's and the manager's, the trigger that must reach the desk, and the risk list.
• The Offboarding Checklist: Disable First, Delete Later
  Disable sign-in, revoke sessions, handle the mail, return the device, change the shared passwords, reclaim the licences, hold before deleting; and the checklist in that order.
• Same-Day and Immediate Exits: The No-Notice Runbook
  The termination with no notice: who calls whom, the minute-by-minute, disabling during the meeting, the device still in the person's hands, the discretion, and the immediate-exit runbook.
• Getting the Equipment Back From Every Leaver
  The return process for office and remote leavers, and the signed receipt. Covers what to do when it never comes back, wiping and re-issue, the asset note, and the return letter.
• The Leaver's Data and Mailbox: Who Gets What, for How Long
  Who gets access and for how long, the manager who wants everything, retention in plain words, converting the mailbox, the shared-drive handover, and the data handover record.
• The Leaver Audit: Finding the Accounts Nobody Disabled
  The quarterly reconciliation against the HR leaver list, orphaned and service accounts, the external accounts HR never knew about, days-to-disable, and the quarterly leaver audit.

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This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.