OffboardingHuman Resources

An Offboarding Ordeal: HR Departments Say Departing Employees Consistently Ghost Exit Interviews, Steal Company Equipment

Brian Westfall profile picture
By Brian Westfall

Published
11 min read
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Among HR workers who offboarded employees in the past year, 86% say at least one employee skipped their exit interview, and 71% say at least one employee didn’t return company-owned equipment, like a laptop or smartphone.

Employee offboarding—the process of transitioning an employee out of a company—doesn’t get a ton of attention in HR relative to other areas. For most employers, offboarding is an afterthought; more a compliance box to check than any kind of opportunity to add value to the organization.

But according to Capterra’s 2022 Employee Offboarding Survey, which collected responses from nearly 300 HR workers who manage offboarding for their employer, this lax attitude toward offboarding comes at a considerable cost.*

For starters, among HR workers who oversaw offboarding for an employee who quit or was fired in the past year, 86% say at least one employee didn’t show up to their exit interview—starving organizations of their best opportunity to identify and rectify causes of regrettable attrition.

More concerning is that 71% of these HR workers also say at least one employee who left the organization didn’t return company-owned equipment like a laptop or smartphone. Each employee who does so is walking away with nearly $2,000 worth of equipment, on average, but it’s the proprietary systems and data that can be accessed by this equipment—often by disgruntled people with retaliation on the mind—where the real damage lies.

In this report, we’ll dive into our survey results to understand which organizations are most at risk from such offboarding mishaps, and offer advice on what you can do as an HR manager to prevent ex-employees from causing significant harm to your organization after they walk out the door.

/ Key findings

  1. Exit interview ghosting is rampant: 86% of HR workers who offboarded employees in the past year say at least one employee didn’t show up to their exit interview. 70% say multiple employees didn’t show.

  2. Hybrid/remote employees take company equipment most often: 71% of HR workers who offboarded employees in the past year say at least one employee didn’t return company-owned equipment, like a laptop or smartphone. Hybrid and remote employees were 17% more likely to not return company-owned equipment than on-site employees.

  3. Employees walk away with $2,000 worth of company-owned equipment, on average: HR employees estimate that each employee who stole company-owned equipment in the past year walked away with $1,963 of equipment, on average.

  4. Stolen equipment contains sensitive info that companies can't always protect: Of the 59% of HR workers who say stolen company-owned equipment contained sensitive information, only 55% were able to completely lock out the employee from using the equipment.

HR says employees routinely skip exit interviews on their way out

Exit interviews can be an invaluable tool for organizations trying to diagnose why employees are leaving. Unfortunately, our survey data tells us a lot of exiting employees are reluctant to participate in them.

Of the 219 survey respondents who managed offboarding of an employee who quit or was fired in the past year, 86% say at least one employee didn’t show up to their exit interview, and 70% say multiple employees didn’t show up. These results were consistent regardless of where the employee worked (on-site, hybrid, or remote) or the size of the company—indicating this problem isn’t unique to one type of organization.

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Exit interviews have many obstacles going against them. For one thing, employees don’t always leave an organization on good terms, making them less likely to participate in exit interviews or even give honest feedback about their work experience.

Those who do leave on good terms don’t have much of an incentive to participate either—any problems that caused them to leave may be fixed thanks to their input, but the employee won’t be working at the company anymore to benefit. Obvious solutions that would increase participation, such as withholding an employee’s final paycheck until they complete their exit interview, are also illegal.

5 ways to increase exit interview participation

The more exit interview data you can get your hands on as an HR department, the quicker you can confidently identify common pain points in your employee experience. It’s an uphill battle, but here are five ways you can increase exit interview participation among departing employees:

1. Use an online survey tool instead of an in-person interview

When employees are trying to tie up loose ends before they leave, the last thing they need is another sit-down meeting taking up their limited time. Moving your exit interview online has a number of benefits: Not only can employees answer your questions at their leisure, but you can ensure consistency between each exit interview in terms of how each question is asked. It’s also a timesaver to have exit interview data automatically logged and ready to analyze. Using an employee pulse survey tool is a great way to digitize your exit interviews.

2. Stress that feedback will be kept anonymous (with some exceptions)

Employees will be less likely to point out company shortcomings if they believe they’ll be targeted for their accusations or burn bridges with colleagues. Wherever possible, emphasize that any feedback provided in exit interviews will be stripped of any personally identifiable information before it’s shared. The only time that feedback shouldn’t be kept anonymous is if an employee reports criminal behavior, including harassment or discrimination.

3. If you insist on an in-person interview, have HR conduct it

In a recent survey, 46% of workers said they currently have a manager or a team lead that makes them want to quit their job.[1] With managers being a significant driving force behind why employees leave, the last thing you want is them conducting exit interviews. Employees might be too intimidated to give honest feedback, and managers will be less likely to report any criticism levied against them.

4. Demonstrate that you take employee feedback seriously from the start

If an employee saw during their tenure that feedback wasn’t asked for or acted on, why would they give feedback about their experience when they leave? Ultimately, exit interviews are an exercise in trust. If you continually demonstrate to your employees that feedback is not only encouraged but instrumental to identifying and fixing problems, they’ll be more likely to trust that their exit interview responses will be put to good use.

5. Leave the door open for a return down the road

So-called boomerang employees—workers who leave for a new job only to come back to their previous employer later—accounted for 4.5% of all new hires in 2021, up from 3.9% in 2019, according to LinkedIn.[2] If you have an alumni network, encourage exiting employees to join it to stay up-to-date on company announcements and job opportunities. Even if you don’t have an official alumni network, make sure it’s clear that coveted employees can reapply to the organization if their new job elsewhere doesn’t work out.

Hybrid/remote employees are taking off with company laptops, smartphones

As troubling as it is that departing employees often ghost their exit interviews, the consequences of such a phenomenon amount to more of a missed opportunity than anything else. No real damage is being done to the organization.

That’s not the case with our other key offboarding finding. According to our HR survey respondents, employees who leave their organization also frequently take company-owned equipment—such as laptops and smartphones—with them, and don’t give it back.

Among HR workers who offboarded an employee in the past year, 71% say at least one employee didn't return company-owned equipment. Splitting up our results by work location, we find that hybrid and remote employees are 17% more likely to not return company-owned equipment than employees who work entirely on-site.

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Technology is critical to making the hybrid and remote work worlds go round and, as a result, more company-owned equipment is in employee homes than ever before. Simultaneously portable and out of sight from office eyes, it’s all too easy for hybrid and remote employees to not return laptops, smartphones, webcams, and other types of technology when they leave the organization and hope no one notices.

And even if you do notice equipment has been swiped, what then? If ex-employees aren’t willing to give the equipment back voluntarily, the only option companies really have is through the criminal justice system. But our survey finds that companies rarely bother to go this often expensive and/or time-consuming route.

While 61% of HR workers who witnessed an exiting employee not return company equipment in the past year say their employer threatened criminal or legal action as a result, only 48% say the company ultimately filed a police report. Less than that (21%) sued the employee in civil court.

The monetary cost of stolen equipment quickly adds up. When asked how much equipment employees stole from the organization, HR workers estimate that each incident of theft in the past year resulted in the loss of $1,963 worth of equipment, on average. Just five such incidents per year and companies are looking at close to a five-figure loss on their ledger before we even account for the cost of replacing the equipment.

Yet, the biggest cost for employers comes not from what the stolen equipment is worth, but what it can do.

Stolen equipment often contains sensitive company data—here’s how to keep it safe

Whether ex-employees keep stolen equipment for themselves or sell it on the open market to make a quick buck, the real damage to organizations from equipment theft is the sensitive data that can be accessed from it.

Just last year, Block—the parent company of Cash App—announced in an April 2022 SEC filing that a former employee had downloaded reports containing customer information, including full names and brokerage account numbers.[3] Cash App ultimately had to notify 8.2 million current and former customers of the breach, severely impacting the company's reputation.

Despite the potential for serious harm, our survey finds that companies often leave themselves exposed: Of the HR workers in our survey who reported equipment theft from exiting employees in the past year, a majority (59%) say the equipment contained confidential or sensitive company data.

And while 55% of these respondents were able to completely lock former employees out from using the equipment—keeping sensitive data protected—the other 45% could only partially lock the ex-employee out. In this case, ex-employees couldn’t access company accounts and software systems, but they could still use the equipment itself. If an ex-employee had already downloaded the data before losing system access, the company was already out of luck.

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Here’s how to keep ex-employees from taking off with your sensitive company data

The financial and reputational harm that can come from a data leak involving an ex-employee can be catastrophic. Here are four steps you should take as an organization to prevent this from happening:

1. Have a formal offboarding process in place

Who takes a laptop back when an employee quits? Who is responsible for revoking their access from company systems? Establishing a formal offboarding process that teams can be trained on, where every employee knows their role in seeing it to completion, can ensure that an important step doesn’t fall through the cracks.

2. Get yourself an IT asset management system

Not tracking the technology you loan out to employees is a good way for a piece of equipment to fall in the wrong hands undetected. An IT asset management system can help your IT team keep track of the equipment every employee has, and ensure that every piece is accounted for when a worker makes their exit.

3. Password managers are your friend

When an employee leaves, not only does someone need to remove any individual logins that employee had to company systems, they also need to change the password on any shared logins the employee used as well. A password manager, which can generate random passwords and store them securely, makes this tedious process much easier.

4. Being able to access equipment remotely is critical

If an ex-employee goes rogue with company equipment, you need a way to quickly prevent them from using it. Our advice is to look for an employee monitoring system with remote access functionality. Installed on each device you loan out, these systems allow your company to lock people out from using the equipment, even without physical access to the device. This is especially important if you have any employees that work remotely.

Offboarding deserves just as much, if not more, attention than onboarding

Companies pour tons of resources into their onboarding process, warmly welcoming new hires and getting them quickly up-to-speed on how to do their jobs. Shouldn’t the same attention and care be paid to offboarding?

If our survey results are any indication, the answer is yes. Lax offboarding efforts not only dissolve the opportunity to get valuable data from exit interviews, but open companies up to severe consequences from equipment and data theft.

With a possible recession leading to mass layoffs in the near future, HR departments should take the time now to ensure their offboarding provides maximum value while reducing organizational risk.


Methodology

*Capterra’s 2022 Employee Offboarding Survey was conducted in November 2022 among 287 HR employees who handle offboarding responsibilities for their employer. The goal of this survey was to understand the challenges companies run into offboarding employees, and if the prevalence of different challenges varies between on-site, hybrid, and remote employees.


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About the Author

Brian Westfall profile picture

Brian Westfall is an associate principal analyst at Capterra, covering human resources, with a focus on recruiting, talent management, and employee engagement. Over the past decade, Brian’s research on the intersection of talent and technology has been featured in Bloomberg, Fortune, SHRM, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. He also led a session - “Become Data-Driven Or Drown: Why Winners and Losers of The Next Recession Will Be Decided By Tech” - at the SHRM Talent Conference & Expo in 2023.

When he isn’t helping small and midsize businesses get the most out of their HR technology, Brian can be found playing with his two corgis or traveling the world.

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