Employee offboarding checklist template

Employees come and go—are you prepared for both? We tend to structure our onboarding processes to help new employees hit the ground running, but we don’t always do the same for offboarding. Offboarding, or the process of helping employees leave your company, is just as important as onboarding—but it’s often overlooked. An employee’s departure will inevitably affect their team, workflows, and projects. But you can ease this transition and limit interruptions with a reusable employee offboarding template.

What is employee offboarding?

Employee offboarding is the transition process when an employee leaves your company. Having a structured offboarding process helps capture all of the employee’s responsibilities, so remaining team members understand the work they need to coordinate and take on during the transition. It also helps your people managers and HR employees as they close out loose ends (such as receiving a resignation letter and returning company assets).

Your employee offboarding experience will depend on your company culture and specific organizational needs, but the process should: 

• Prepare the team for the employee’s departure.

• Ensure you make all necessary announcements.

• Help the human resources department gather paperwork.

• Facilitate knowledge transfer to gather concepts, processes, and work-in-progress before an employee’s last day.

• Have steps for gathering laptops, ID cards, and any remaining materials owned by the company.

• Include an exit interview to gain feedback and improve the work experience for future employees.

Regardless of what you include, there are a lot of steps involved in offboarding an employee, including critical details that are easy to overlook. Creating an employee offboarding checklist template will help you to track this process and ensure you do all the right things for every departing employee. When an existing employee notifies you that they’re leaving, simply duplicate the checklist template and begin the process. 

The purpose of a digital employee offboarding checklist template

Sometimes, a good old-fashioned checklist is the perfect way to stay organized. But rather than writing one out or printing a saved doc that’s clunky and hard to update, you can create a digital employee offboarding checklist template. This not only keeps you organized throughout the employee offboarding process, but it also ensures that the offboarding process is always consistent across your organization.

Because of this, you won’t miss any crucial steps. For example, you know that you need to submit information to your health insurance provider as part of your employee offboarding process. If you overlook this step, the departing employee might not qualify for extended health care after they go—not the best way to end the employee experience. Using the same checklist for every employee (copied from your template) ensures that you never miss a step, big or small, in your offboarding process.

6 steps to create an offboarding checklist template

Create your offboarding checklist template in six straightforward steps:

1. Review materials. Gather everything you need to properly offboard your employees and review it. If you already have existing documents, processes, or offboarding guides, be sure to include those here. 

2. Check in with other departments. The employee’s manager and HR department will usually oversee offboarding, but it’s important to consider the needs of other departments too. What does IT need? How about the finance team? Here, you’ll gain an awareness of important steps you might have overlooked that are company-wide, such as signing a non-disclosure agreement.

3. Create sections to organize checklist tasks. The exact tasks will vary depending on your specific company needs, but include basic information like the employee’s name and role, paperwork that needs to be completed, and steps to take (for example, scheduling an exit interview).

4. Connect relevant documents and information. On top of coordinating processes, you can also use project management software to add documents directly to the checklist. For example, you can attach forms that need to be reviewed and signed with assigned deadlines to keep everyone on track. 

5. Save it in an accessible space. In order for the checklist template to boost consistency across the company, it needs to be used by the whole organization. Once you create your offboarding checklist template, save it in a universal space where anyone can access it. 

6. Share it. Share your template with anyone who might need to offboard employees, including people managers, team leads, and department heads.

Integrated features

• List View. List View is a grid-style view that makes it easy to see all of your project’s information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all of your tasks at once so you can not only see task titles and due dates, but also view any relevant custom fields like Priority, Status, or more. 

• Timeline View. Timeline View is a Gantt-style project view that displays all of your tasks in a horizontal bar chart. Not only can you see each task’s start and end date, but you can also see dependencies between tasks. With Timeline View, you can easily track how the pieces of your plan fit together. Plus, when you can see all of your work in one place, it’s easy to identify and address dependency conflicts before they start, so you can hit all of your goals on schedule.

• Forms. When someone fills out a Form, it shows up as a new task within an Asana project. By intaking information via a Form, you can standardize the way work gets kicked off, gather the information you need, and ensure no work falls through the cracks. Instead of treating each request as an ad hoc process, create a standardized system and set of questions that everyone has to answer. Or, use branching logic to tailor questions based on a user’s previous answer. Ultimately, Forms help you reduce the time and effort it takes to manage incoming requests so your team can spend more time on the work that matters.

• Subtasks. Sometimes a to-do is too big to capture in one task. If a task has more than one contributor, a broad due date, or stakeholders that need to review and approve before it can go live, subtasks can help. Subtasks are a powerful way to distribute work and split tasks into individual components—while keeping the small to-dos connected to the overarching context of the parent task. Break tasks into smaller components or capture the individual components of a multi-step process with subtasks.

Recommended apps

• Dropbox. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Dropbox file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane.

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack.

• Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

• OneDrive. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Microsoft OneDrive file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach files from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.

FAQs