Whether an employee leaves a company of their own accord or not, they first must be offboarded to ensure an easy and secure transition from their current role to their next one. IT administrators play a critical role in the offboarding process and must quickly and efficiently off-board the employee to keep business running smoothly. Follow our nine-step checklist to make sure you’re protecting your company’s network and data.
When an employee leaves a company, offboarding is the process of ensuring that they have a smooth and secure transition from their current role to their next one. This includes tasks such as ensuring that all their accounts are closed and transferred, returning all devices and that the former employee can proceed easily to their new job.
Employee off-boarding is critical not just for securing company data, but also for maintaining a safe workplace. A recent study has shown that about 89% of employees still had access to their company’s network and data after termination and around 83% continued to access their old employer’s accounts. With insider cyber-attacks rising by 44% over the past two years, it is more critical than ever to properly off-board employees after they leave your company.
Here are some of the key steps involved in successfully offboarding an employee along with some of the best practices for making the process smoother.
1. Disable all accounts and change passwords
One of the first steps in offboarding an employee is to disable their user accounts and change any passwords they may have had access to. This helps to ensure that the former employee does not have any access to company data or systems. Additionally, it is important to update any additional identity security measures such as multi-factor authentication that the employee may have been using.
2. Collect company-owned devices
The next step is to collect any company property that the employee may have, such as phones, laptops, keys, or ID badges. It is important to do this as soon as possible so that the employee does not have access to company resources. Additionally, you should check with the employee to make sure that they have not taken any confidential information with them. If an employee is working remotely, you will need to arrange for someone to collect their devices from them or have the employee ship their devices back.
3. Securely erase company devices
Either remotely or when the company devices are returned, securely erase the information on those devices. This will ensure that any company data on the devices cannot be accessed by the former employee. Once this is done you can prepare the devices for use by a new employee.
4. Contact Third-Parties
You should also notify any customers, partners or vendors, with whom the employee worked and provide them with the new contact information for your company. This will ensure that there are no potential information issues and that third-parties are able to continue working with your company without interruption.
5. Update your company’s HR records
Finally, you will need to update your company’s HR records to reflect the employee’s departure. This includes removing them from any health insurance or other benefits they may have been receiving. You will also need to update their contact information and emergency contact information. Once this is done, you can send out a farewell message to current employees. Additionally, by keeping open communication with the departing employee, you can help to make the transition as easy as possible for them.
6. Follow cyber-compliance policies
When offboarding an employee, it is important to make certain you are operating within compliance of any relevant cyber-security regulations. For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cyber Security Framework (NIST CSF) requires companies to take specific measures when deleting employee data. Additionally, ISO 27001 is a standard for information security management and requires companies to have a plan for terminating employees. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires companies to protect the privacy of employee health information. By following all applicable regulations, you can help to ensure that your company complies when offboarding employees.
You can make sure that your company’s offboarding procedure is effective and safe by following these procedures. Whether an employee leaves your company by their choice or yours, offboarding them as quickly and efficiently as possible is key to limiting any exposure of your business to a disgruntled former employee. By following these tips, you can minimize the amount of time they have access to your IT systems and ensure that they depart on good terms. If you have any questions about how to execute these tips or would like help with offboarding your employees, feel free to reach out to us at sales@montra.io.
Too many systems, too many self-service portals. How many times a month are you or your employees being asked to update information in one of your systems – addresses, phone numbers, personal emails, bank information, emergency contacts – who has time to update all the systems everywhere.
Just think about it:
So, every time an employee does work for a new customer, or moves, or changes job title, then they would need to update every system that tracks that. Most people don’t even know what systems hold their info, much less have the time to make changes. And with more dynamic information like where they are working for the day or are the currently online, keeping multiple systems up-to-date completely breaks down.
Why do we have this problem?
The problem is that there isn’t really a system of record for employee information in most companies. Instead, there are many systems of record. What most companies have today typically looks like the following:
3 Functions an Employee Information Systems Provides
What companies really need is a centralized repository of employee information with three primary functions:
1. Employee Self-Service: Allow employees to update their own information easily and reliably
2. Secure Employee Directory: A great benefit of having reliable employee information, is that the information can then be shared internally. That said, there is far more information in the HRIS than should be published for all employees. A good employee information manager needs to have privacy settings that allow the proper handling of employee data.
3. APIs Everywhere: If the Employee Information System is going to stay valuable, it needs to have APIs to as many systems the affect employees as possible. This list can be long but should include the HRIS, Email, Slack/Teams, Phone Systems, Device Managers, Finance, CRM, and Employee Notification Systems.
It cannot be understated how important having accurate employee information available to all people and systems within a company is – especially as we move into a continually hybrid working work. Great companies will stop treating employee knowledge as tribal information exchanged between employees close to one another and will instead treat employee info the way they treat customer info – as strategic corporate asset to be treated with care and importance it should have.
Want to learn more about managing your employee information better? Contact us and we can tell you about the software and services Montra provides to get you on your own journey to great Employee Information Management. sales@montra.io
Now more than ever in this hybrid working world, employees value transparency, connectedness, and timely communication. When your organization communicates with employees when an incident occurs, or when an announcement affects their safety, they know that their time and well-being are being respected.
An employee notification system makes the immediate reception of important information possible anytime and anywhere. The messages can inform or alert to maximize productivity of your employees.
Texts and messaging apps are already a central part of your employees’ lives. Texts and messaging app messages like Slack are mostly read within the first 3 minutes after being sent, as opposed to only 22% of emails. Using these systems can help you to connect to your employees, increase engagement, and ultimately boost the employee experience. They’re quick, easy to manage and utilize all the devices they are using, from laptops to smartphones.
When to Use Employee Notifications
When starting to use an employee notification system, the following use cases have been shown to be the most efficient and value-packed:
The Rules of Employee Notifications
Employee notifications work, but sending too many, sending them at the wrong time, not targeting your message, or simply not providing value can quickly lead employees to ignore them. Consider the following rules when you generate your next employee message:
Pay Attention to Timing and Wording
Timing. Localytics data shows that when using sending an employee message, Thursday is currently the best day to get high click rates. The data further shows that sending messages between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. results in the highest average click rate: 15%.
Wording. Keep your messages clear, concise, and compact. The aim is to catch your employees’ attention and quickly communicate your message. Messages should offer clear, concrete value, and communicate the desired action.
Educate Your Employees on the System
Once you implement your notification system, announce to your employees that you will be using a new service to notify everyone within the organization of critical events or announcements. It’s key that all employees understand that these notifications are important to stay informed and in the loop.
Use Multiple Channels and Groups
Multi-Channel. If you have an important message that needs to get to your people ASAP, make sure you leverage your employee notification system’s multi-channel functionality. Select as many channels as you believe are appropriate for your notification, but if this is indeed an emergency, we recommend contacting your employees over text message, email, Teams or Slack, voice call, and social media.
Groups. To reach them with the right message at the best time, you’ll want to be sure to create robust grouping hierarchies that reflect your organization’s structure, for example, groups based on department, office location, and role for example. And if your organization has many locations, send notifications from the map using geofencing, so you can capture all employees in an affected region.
Engaging your employees through thoughtful, relevant messages will enable your organization to interact and communicate with your employees successfully. Correctly using an employee notification system can help you connect with your employees in meaningful ways, create value for them, increase engagement and ultimately boost your employee’s experience.
Are you interested in leveraging employee notification capabilities of Montra VIA? Do you want to connect with your hybrid workforce faster and more completely? Don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@montra.io!
The past two years have had a major impact on everyone’s lives, so we are looking forward to 2022 with anticipation (well, not as much as the anticipation last year leading into 2021.) Some of the biggest changes as it relates to work have been in how and where we work, the increasing number of cybersecurity threats, and the changes in how IT services are delivered. As we look forward to 2022, we can see that these trends will have a big impact on how and why companies manage their employee information.
Employee information management is an important topic for a lot of mid-sized companies, especially those that are experiencing or are planning for a lot of growth. Running efficient on-boarding and off-boarding processes, keeping track of the latest employee information, and maintaining proper access to the right systems and services, are all functions impacted by good employee information management.
One of the challenges for businesses with their people information management is that there are islands of data on employees and contractors that exist within most organizations. Recruiting databases, HRIS, email systems, physical security access systems, finance systems, and other services, all maintain subsets of data on employees. Due to security and privacy concerns, it is difficult to access and update all these systems either by employees or by the admins. Additionally, the systems almost never talk to each other to synchronize changes.
This leads to three critical areas of concern with poor employee information management:
1. Employee Onboarding Takes Too Long: it takes longer to get new employees operational and effective
2. Security Risk is High: it is difficult to track employee credentials across all the systems and services for which they should be granted access
3. Employee Data Gets Stale and Inaccurate: Applications that rely on this data – like disaster recovery services – can become completely ineffective.
With that in mind, here are our top trends for Employee Information Management in 2022:
1. Increasing Employee Churn Will Drive Need for Better Employee Onboarding / Offboarding
The economy will continue its post-lockdown expansion. This will continue to fuel the higher rates of employee departures and arrivals than ever before. Employers are more pressured than ever to make certain the onboarding process is as quick and accurate as possible, while the offboarding process is secure and trackable for cybersecurity and compliance purposes.
2. The Definition of the Employee Workplace Will Continue to Broaden
The workplace has been changed forever over the past couple of years. More employees are working at home, in a co-working space, or even a in a second home away from major cities. What used to be a special case (“We have 3 offices and a few people that work from home.”) will continue to move toward the norm in 2022. Systems that track employee location today are almost all static and assume that a limited number of workplace addresses exist. Employers need to rethink what an employee workplace is and how they plan to handle this more dynamic and fragmented nature of the workplace.
3. Workplace Information Will Need to Be More Dynamic Than Ever
Understanding where an employee is, was, and will be, will become critical for company IT staff and others needing accurate workplace information in 2022. For cybersecurity policies and compliance to work properly, accurate information about a person’s location is needed. Different access policies can be enforced, and audit trails can be created to trace issues when they occur. Additionally, in the case of a disaster or other emergency, employers can know who was in what workplace and how notifications and recovery processes should be handled.
4. Employee Offboarding Will Need to Be More Accurate
Most mid-sized and high-growth companies do not well-run offboarding processes. With more employees leaving a company, any inefficiencies in the offboarding process will get exposed in 2022. In the past when a person was exited, the accuracy of removing access to every system was not that critical. If physical access to the building and email access was removed, offboarding was “80% done”. The rest of the systems could be updated at leisure. The modern workplace in 2022 will drive the need for accuracy. Enabling this means employee information about account and systems credentials needs to be accurate and easily accessible to the appropriate people. If the information is accurate, the former employee could have access to data or services that put the company at risk.
5. Companies Subject to Cyber and Privacy Compliance Requirements Will Expand
In 2022, expansions to the compliance requirements in HIPAA, PCI-DSS, CCPA, and GDPR, will pull more companies under the cybersecurity compliance and data privacy umbrellas. The definition of “third party” has now been expanded to “fourth party” in these frameworks, which broadly expands which companies must comply. Think “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” but a lot less fun. So even if your company isn’t specifically in the healthcare business, if your company does business with a company that does business with a company in healthcare, then your company may be subject to HIPAA.
6. Demand for Better Employee Information Sharing Will Increase
With all these employees working from home or in smaller satellite offices, what happens to the serendipitous interactions that happen in larger centralized workplaces? What happens to the friendships and even marriages that routines developed in the workplace of the past? Collaboration tools like Zoom and Slack exist already to make communication happen easily and quickly, but the tools to enable the sharing of deeper information are almost non-existent. Think: LinkedIn but for internal use only. Enabling employees to publish workplace relevant information and search on the information of others will spike in demand in 2022. This new area will continue to expand and evolve as the need for better familiarity and collegiality will be needed to enable better teamwork.
Download our Employee Information Management Infographic here
What do you think about managing your employee information? How do you think it will change in 2022? Let us know what you think at info@montra.io.