Mastering Your IT Onboarding… and Yes, Offboarding Too

Picture your team for a moment and consider the experience a new hire might have during their first hours on the job. How effective are they at accomplishing tasks, or is their time spent jumping through hoops and getting set up with their technology?

Similarly, what does one of your team members’ last days look like? Amicable or not, a poorly managed departure can lead to considerable problems. Let’s talk about why properly managing technology during the onboarding and offboarding process is so crucial, and how to get it right.

How to Successfully Onboard a New Employee

A good onboarding process should accomplish two primary goals: to make a new team member feel like a part of the team, and to expedite the time it takes for them to be productive in their role. Being prepared and providing a new user with the right technology can simplify this considerably.

What You Need to Have Ready for Any New Team Member

• Hardware - All devices, from the workstation your employee will use to the peripherals they need, should be configured and ready for them at their workspace.
• Accounts - Any logins should be created and tested before your new hire arrives, from network access to email and software licensing.
• Permissions - To ensure your new team member can hit the ground running, they should have access to everything they need as defined by their role, nothing more, nothing less.
• Training - Any new employee will need to be introduced to your company, its policies and culture, as well as its technology and the security expectations you’ve established.

Having these elements prepared for when someone new joins your business will ultimately help them acclimate to the job more effectively, delivering mutual benefits. They’ll grow comfortable in their role more quickly, and you won’t have to wait as long for them to start generating ROI.

Of course, everyone will eventually leave a business, whether they retire, find a different opportunity, or are told to pack up their desk and go. In these situations, properly offboarding an employee is just as important—if not more so—than onboarding them.

How to Successfully and Securely Offboard an Employee

The goal of any offboarding process is to establish closure. Ensuring that your data and other assets don’t leave with a departing employee is a key part of that closure. As such, there are specific steps that must be carried out whenever someone leaves your employment.

What You Need to Do Whenever a Team Member Leaves

• Rescind Permissions - Make sure that all of a departing user’s accounts are fully disabled and deactivated, from email to cloud apps to your VPN.
• Transfer Data - Migrate ownership of all files and email contents to a manager.
• Retrieve Assets - Collect and inventory all company property, from laptops, phones, MFA tokens, and other physical assets.
• Double-check - Perform a final audit to confirm that no points of access were missed during the offboarding process.

This is absolutely critical to do, as many employees have been found still to have access to sensitive company information or systems after they have left their job, on occasion, in over 50 percent of cases. This opens up a company to a significant risk of a data breach. Therefore, you need to emphasize these checks to minimize this risk.

We Can Help You Establish and Uphold These Systems

These are tasks that you need to complete every time someone joins or leaves your business… but that isn’t to say you need to do it alone. We’re here to help, and we’ll do so using tools and strategies that help automate your responsibilities. That way, you can focus on directing your employees without having to spend time on the administrative aspects of your operations.

If you’re interested in learning more about what we can manage on your behalf, be sure to reach out to us at 631-905-9617.