How To Master The Offboarding Process In Order To Master Retention

* This article by MashTank’s founder, Michael White, originally appeared in Forbes.

In the ecosystem of your company, the most important life cycle taking place is that of your people: attracting the right talent, onboarding and optimizing them and then offboarding with the knowledge of why they left and what you can learn from it.

And in theory, most leaders understand this life cycle. People will come and go, as is the nature of life, and we as leaders can perform exit interviews to learn along the way.

But from my experience of working with executives and teams over the last 25 years, here’s what I actually see happen most of the time:

1. In the first phase, you attract some people. Depending on your culture and unique value propositions as an employer, you may or may not be attracting the perfect people from the get-go.
2. In the next phase, you onboard those people.
3. Eventually, over time, people leave and you offboard them.

What most businesses are missing is the optimization within all these phases in order to make the process actionable, effective and measurable.

Looking at the last phase, people don’t just up and leave. They fall into one of two categories:

1. Graduates: They achieved milestones that led them elsewhere. They become loyal alumni who might even come back in the future, which would be welcomed.
2. Defectors: They were unhappy with something about their employment situation, either as a simple culture misfit (because not everyone can fit) or because you, a leader in the company, dropped the ball.

Reasons For Departure

In the offboarding process, most companies only check the boxes about the state of the relationship at the time of departure. Did anything big happen that caused them to quit? Is there any drama to note? Is it “just for personal reasons”? You could be learning so much more.

By knowing if someone is a graduate, the offboarding process can be a time of celebration. This team member did so well within your company, both in their job and in the time they got to have for their personal life, that they’re moving onward and upward in their journey.

Perhaps your personalized benefits program allowed them to finally take the right courses they needed before they could leap into being an entrepreneur and starting their own business. Perhaps, they’ve saved enough to take months off in order to backpack around the world. The ways people might be able to meet their goals in order to get more out of their life are endless. As their employer, you should congratulate yourself on optimizing your employee’s talents so well that they fulfilled everything you needed from them, right up until their next phase of life. From here, you’ve got yourself loyal alumni, maybe even evangelists.

On the other hand, by finding out if someone is a defector, you have the chance for an actionable, productive list of opportunities on your hands. If someone is defecting, it’s possible they just weren’t the right fit for the culture. Not everyone can be, not when personalities are so unique.

However, more often, someone is a defector because you, the employer, dropped the ball in some way. Perhaps it’s that this person didn’t feel appreciated, and resentment built up over years. Perhaps there was dishonesty or lack of transparency that higher-up leaders weren’t even aware of. Perhaps this is the third person to defect from a specific department, and there’s a need to reassess resources or direct managers in that department.

The reasons someone might defect are as unique as the person themselves. And with each and every one, when the offboarding process is optimized and done right, you should be able to learn in a way that is actionable and measurable moving forward.

When a company becomes committed to optimizing offboarding processes, defecting decreases, graduates happen naturally and the company benefits in areas like productivity, retention and profitability.

Optimizing Retention

So let’s go just one step further. Instead of waiting until the last phase to assess and optimize, hold retention interviews, not just exit interviews. This brings us to the optimization that was missing in the first two phases.

The ultimate, measurable, research-proven method to optimizing talent (and therefore retention and profitability) is by working with team members to help them reach their goals. This includes goals directly related to the business (e.g., wanting to learn more about a certain part of the company for career trajectory) and unrelated to the business (e.g., wanting help reaching a personal goal in their life, be that investing in classes, more downtime for a hobby, etc.).

By making time to listen to their goals, finding creative ways for them to find passion in at least part of what they do day-to-day and instilling a culture of trust, phases one and two become optimized for retention before you even need to worry about offboarding. Trust yourself to care about them as a whole human enough to invest in them as such. Because when you don’t, someone else will. And who would blame someone for going where they’re more likely to feel cared for and could get more of their life back?

An Optimized Ecosystem

In an optimized ecosystem, retention practices and lessons aren’t just learned when someone exits, and they’re not just questions shouted to someone halfway out the door with hopes for the best.

Instead, you can learn throughout the relationship and become better for it. You are made better not just as a company—wherein you’ll be able to boast higher morale, loyalty, productivity and profitability—but as a team of people who have personal goals and outside lives. This is about the sum of people, and eventually, as a world. It starts with caring and making it measurable—because what you can measure, you can improve.

* This article by MashTank’s founder, Michael White, originally appeared in Forbes.