A poor offboarding program impacts your culture more than a great onboarding program.
Recently I met up with a colleague I haven’t seen in few years. Last we spoke, I was her client. As her client, I was always impressed with her knowledge, follow through, professionalism, loyalty to her employer, basically everything. She was fantastic at her job. However, she wanted more career growth and was entertaining a position elsewhere. Her employer got wind of it and fired her. Really? Are we still this short sided? She was there for 5+ years and was a great employee. (Yes, I might be biased because I know her level of customer service and yes there are always two sides to an employee/employer story).
There was never a conversation to find out why she was looking to leave. Just jumped straight to termination. And, yes, she did reach out to her manager to explore the possibility of other roles to grow her career. It went nowhere.
She left on bad terms with a terrible perception of leadership and their treatment of employees. And now I don’t want to work with this vendor because of how they treat their employees. It’s the same reason why I don’t go back to a sushi restaurant with great food but horrible service. All because the company probably has a policy to fire an employee if they explore other employment. The negative impact of her abrupt departure was probably not something the leadership team thought through.
This is exactly what we want our employees to do – to grow and challenge themselves. This is what makes them valuable to your organization. How excited and committed would she have been if her manager responded positively? How would her clients benefit? How would this impact the bottom line? What if the organization couldn’t meet her career goals and she left anyway? Then, she moves on feeling great about her time there and can still speak highly of the company.
An employee exploring other opportunities isn’t a threat. Seeing this as a threat is managing out of fear and results in a whole host of issues not conducive to the culture you want to build. Also, had there been frequent conversations around career goals between her and her manager, this situation may have been avoided. But that’s another topic for another time.
A great onboarding program is important to an employee’s success. A compassionate offboarding culture is vital to the organization’s success. And, fortunately, I’ve found a new sushi restaurant to replace the one with poor service.
