Creating employee engagement and establishing employee loyalty is crucial to any business’s success. However, so much importance is placed on onboarding, that it’s easy to forget the importance of a good offboarding process.
With the right offboarding process, turning ex-employees into loyal alumni is a breeze. Read on to discover how it’s done.
The importance of employee offboarding
There are several reasons why offboarding matters.
Just as onboarding helps new hires transition to their new workplace, offboarding helps departing employees transition to their new situation. With the right offboarding procedures, you can safeguard your company against wrongful dismissal and similar claims, and maintain your business’s reputation.
It also facilitates constructive feedback from departing employees that will help refine employer-employee relations in the future. Most importantly, a good offboarding process helps the company maintain positive relationships with ex-employees, too.
Key components of an effective employee offboarding process
Conducting an exit interview
The exit interview is an integral part of most companies’ employee offboarding checklist. It provides both the employee and the employer with a sense of closure. It can also bring issues to light that were previously hidden or not fully realized.
So, conduct an exit interview for your exiting employee, and ask the right questions. While asking why they decided to resign is certainly the most immediately relevant, it is not the only relevant question to ask. Need some help? Consult our guide to the best exit interview questions.
An exit survey, before the exit interview, can also determine which questions are most pertinent. It’s less confrontational than an in-person interview and gives all parties an idea of what to expect before the interview itself.
Acknowledging an employee’s contributions
Give credit where it is due. Acknowledge your employee’s various contributions to the workplace, the company culture, and your business’s success. This will show them that you recognize, appreciate and value their efforts while working for the company.
Providing transition support
Provide transition support to your employees for when they leave the company. They may have been a part of the team for years. In that time, they will have built relationships with their colleagues and loyalty ties to the company.
Unfortunately, this is a component that is too often overlooked by companies when their top employees leave. Yet it is easily addressed with a corporate alumni program.
Building long-term relationships with alumni
If you want to build long-term relationships with your corporate alumni, the offboarding process is a good place to start.
By implementing the three components above, you pave the way for further engagement with the company, even after an employee leaves. It is this engagement, built on a foundation of existing loyalty to the company, that will foster a positive long-term relationship.
This is crucial for the success of any corporate alumni program because each alum offers their former employer continued value.
The value of alumni networks
There are many benefits to a corporate alumni network. But to get the most value from your alumni network, you need the right platform.
Aluminate for Enterprise is the solution. It offers a highly customizable and dynamic platform for building alumni networks in any sector. With Aluminate for Enterprise, your alumni network can offer you value in the following ways.
Alumni as mentors
Corporate alumni also make the perfect mentors for current and future employees. They have the experience and expertise that mentorship demands. And their ties to the company culture mean they will want to help others reach their full potential in the organization.
Aluminate’s mentor-matching feature ensures that the best mentoring candidates get matched up with the right mentees.
Alumni as ambassadors
Their knowledge of your employer brand and company culture also makes your corporate alumni suitable brand ambassadors. Who better to promote your brand than the people who have worked alongside you to make it the success it is today?
Alumni as boomerang employees
Your departing employees offer value as potential employees. There’s always the chance that one or more of your corporate alumni are the best future employees for upcoming job vacancies.
By remaining in contact with them through an alumni network, you can tap into this talent pool. Rehiring alumni offers many benefits, especially potentially saving thousands in recruitment.
Aluminate’s digital dashboard is the core of the platform, where alumni can see all news relevant to them, including job openings.
Alumni as clients
Corporate alumni make ideal future clients. They are already familiar with the company and with its products and services and feel loyalty to the brand. This means they will be more likely to retain your services or purchase your products, than a competitor.
But to reach out to former employees in the hopes of turning them into clients, you need to stay up-to-date with their information. Aluminate’s social data sync helps you keep your alumni community data accurate, effortlessly.
Best practices for offboarding
Without the right offboarding program, departing employees may not choose to sustain the connection to the company. These best practices for offboarding will help convince them to remain a part of your corporate community.
Transparent communication
Successful offboarding relies on clear communication, honesty, and transparency. Be transparent in your communication when offboarding employees, and encourage such transparency in return.
Allow your departing employee the freedom to be completely honest about their reasons for leaving. You may hear things you’d rather not, but it will open the door to reform if that is needed. Also, by hearing their insights into the company, you’ll know what it takes to re-engage them as alumni.
Creating an alumni program for former employees
An alumni program can meet many needs. It can create camaraderie, support community engagement, facilitate knowledge transfer, and much more.
Maximize your alumni program’s potential with the right platform, one with features that keep alumni engaged and interacting. Aluminate’s Groups feature lets you create sub-communities within the wider alumni network. Here, alumni can interact with like-minded fellow members.
Providing continued engagement opportunities
Provide opportunities where your alumni can further engage with the company and with fellow alumni.
Host farewell events for departing senior employees who were with the company for a long time and are now retiring. Invite top executives who leave the company to networking events. And offer continued engagement through your alumni program after an employee’s departure.
For those alumni who cannot attend in-person events, host virtual events on your alumni platform.
Stay in touch with your alumni with Aluminate for Enterprise
A positive offboarding process makes it easier to retain ex-employees as valued members of your corporate community. However, inviting them to join your alumni community is also a crucial part of the offboarding process.
If you don’t yet have an established alumni program, you can start one today, with Aluminate for Enterprise. We make it easy to stay in touch with your corporate alumni. Best of all, it’s the world’s most customizable online community platform, ideal for every business type, across all sectors.
Request a demo today.
