Leaving a job smoothly
An offboarding process practical guide
There are several articles about a new employee onboarding in the company to ensure that the newly hired person reaches maximum performance as quickly as possible, but how about when someone is leaving the company?
I’ve said goodbye to several people during my career, besides the emotional part I also had to deal with the side effects of a coworker leaving, which include, but are not limited to, critical integrations done using personal credentials, a manual process done by the living person forgotten, undocumented stuff, etc…
Recently I’ve decided to leave my job and I started to write down everything I’ve done to avoid the issues mentioned before, which I’d like to share since I couldn’t find good material about this topic.
Deciding to leave
During my 15 years of experience in the Tech industry, I’ve changed jobs only three times (until now).
At the beginning of my career, I spent almost 10 years in the same company, mainly because was my first job in the tech industry. I learn a lot working with amazing people, but in the last 2 years of my experience, I felt that I reached a learning plateau and started looking for a new job. That wasn’t a hard decision to make
I use to say, that people should always be doing the interview process even if they’re happy with their actual job (including people from the teams I lead). This is important for several reasons, during an interview process you will know new people, expand your networking, also learn new things with the interviewers, and with that you’ll be able to have a good picture of the market direction by analyzing the job titles, description, and expectations.
From my point of view, doing an interview process, appropriately, doesn’t mean that you’re unhappy or looking for a new job, the interview process could be good for the above reasons or to ensure that you’re happy where you are.
There are several signs that can show you that it’s time to leave your job — 6 Signs It’s Time to Leave Your Job — that you can pay attention to, and once you make the decision there are some other facts to consider after that.
Succession planning
Succession isn't something that you should worry about only when you decide to leave your current job, it's an ongoing job that starts earlier.
Will Larson wrote a good succession planning article which was a good guide, but in my experience, I spend almost a year and a half building a team to a possible transition.
I start bringing senior leaders closer and sharing part of my daily-basis job, like asking them to attend some meetings with me or to hand over some meetings and the goal of that was to expose them to topics that aren’t on their daily basis to understand how I handle those topics but also to create their own opinion about that topics, but also to share opinions and knowledge after the sessions (this is so important as bring people together with you) — meetings are the boring part because spend too much time and cognitive effort, but I see them as the “hands-on part” of the management role.
Besides the "hands-on part", talking frequently about what I was envisioning for the future of the team allow me to have smooth conversations on how to build a clear roadmap to reach that vision in the long term, and also help me to get more feedback about the organizational structure, what needs to be changed, what isn't working well, etc… creating a communication channel which allows them to put their thoughts in practice.
Being transparent with the team about my future intentions by doing all these things was essential to keep trust and avoid fear (kind of).
Announcing you're leaving
It shouldn’t be a surprise to most of the people you trust and share your plans with while building a succession plan, including the direct leader (in my case the CTO). I tried to be transparent about my future intentions earlier, even before I made the decision, and was important.
So when the time comes, be aware that your leader can try to change your mind but it’s important to hold to your plan. Enter the conversation announcing your decision, the reason (assuming you’ve been transparent, up to this point, shouldn't be something new to say), and the transition plan
- Departure timeline: Since I got a job offer that interested me, I’ve shared a plan that worked for me but that had some room to wiggle.
- The next steps will be: Assume a new role in another company (in my case), take time to rest, sabbatical, study, whatever in your case.
- Recommended transition plan: Who should step into the role — on that I'd suggest 3 options a peer, a reportee, or new hire which I could help to hire if need—, where to announce the leaving (meeting, slack, email, etc…) but be open to a more structured communication plan together with HR (what happen in my case)
Transition period
Since I was in the company for a long period — 5 years — after the announcement many people reach out to talk about my motivations to leave, to be grateful for the time we spend working together, to ask for advice, etc… was something really surprising and meaningful to me mainly because I was able to understand the real reach of my work as a leader.
At this point, there was already a replacement for my role, so I was acting more as a consultant making recommendations, rather than leading the function on a daily basis.
Practical checklist
As I mentioned before there are some very tiny things that I’ve done to reduce the amount of side effects after I leave the company and my credentials be deactivated.
- I’ve used Fernanda’s vacation template to share everything I conducted daily with the team (sheets update, recurring checkups, etc…)
- Ensure that all approval workflows (finance, HR, etc…) were changed
- Set the team's OKRs, Goals, KPIs, and career development plans
- Aggregate into a shared drive the most important documents I’ve written(plans, guidelines, presentations, etc…)
- Ask the team to deactivate your user account before leaving in definitive as a test to understand what could break
- Ensure that all email groups have more people than me, as owners
- Change the recurring calendar events ownership
- Ensure that all file shares have more people them me, as owners
- Replace me from the on-call rotation platform
- Email redirect for a specific period and auto-reply email telling that you are a former employee like below:
Subject: Important Notice
Thank you for your message. I’d like to inform that I’m no longer working at [Company Name] as of April, 21st 2023 and unfortunately, I can no longer answer your email. Please direct all future inquiries to Jane Doe, at jane.done@company.com where he will be able to assist you.
Please note that your email will not be forwarded automatically.
Sincerely,
