Time to address one of the most notorious IT blunders that organizations fall victim to: the employee offboarding.
Seems simple, right?
“We have a user leaving… abruptly. We need their access cut off… quickly.”
When you don’t define what this means—and combine that with the time-sensitive nature of some requests—it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.
There is one solution to this problem. Only one.
A Checklist.
That’s it. A checklist is absolutely required for employee onboarding and offboarding. Without having a clear definition of what applications, security, web-based applications, and vendors the user needs access to, there will be massive variation of how your users start their new role.
Why is employee onboarding and offboarding so important?
Onboarding
Without the right application access from day one, your new employee faces unnecessary roadblocks. Onboarding a new paralegal or attorney is already demanding—adding technical delays only increases frustration and downtime.
And it doesn’t stop with the new hire. They’re often paired with a senior team member—sometimes even you. But what happens when that experienced colleague is juggling multiple new hires and can’t provide timely access to essential tools? Productivity takes a hit across the board.
I know you’ve run into this, and I know it’s taken up a lot of your time.
Why do you keep running into this? Answer: your IT Provider does not have a defined checklist in place to standardize the procedure. That’s it.
On the flip side, if user roles like secretary or lawyer don’t define access, a new hire could end up accessing payroll for the entire company.. That’s something we see all the time when we bring on a new client. We fix this right away, but the variation of not having a checklist in place causes immediate and long-term disruption for your employees and business.
Offboarding
A user is getting fired. This is unfortunately prevalent at law firms of all types and sizes. They need to be removed from your systems ASAP! Great. What does that mean?
- Their email?
- What applications were they using?
- Do they have door access?
- Can they access anything from their personal devices?
There’s a lot to consider.
Fortunately, a defined offboarding checklist based on role will solve this problem. We’ll get into more examples with a checklist you can adapt below, but let’s cover WHY this is important first.
If a user needs to be offboarded quickly and the technician skips a thorough review of what that user has access to, critical steps will get missed.
But with a clear offboarding checklist that outlines exactly what to remove, the technician can complete the process confidently and thoroughly.
When offboarding is rushed or incomplete, former employees may still have access to their email, your internal systems, paid third-party tools, and even physical entry to your building. And yet—this still gets overlooked far too often!
How do you solve this problem?
If you have a proactive IT Partner, they’ve already gotten with you on what they need to create this checklist. However, if you’ve read this far into this article, then you probably don’t.
Here are two considerations before we go over the template:
- This is going to vary greatly based on the firm: give it the time and attention it needs. What unique systems, applications, etc. do you have in your business that need to be removed for exiting users?
- There will be some items that the IT Provider completes and other things your internal staff needs to complete. We’ll get into specifics below.
Employee Offboarding Form:
Name: _____
Completion Date: ______
User role: _______
(Managed Service Provider Tasks)
- Remove Microsoft 365 account
- Turn into shared mailbox and forward to: (manager email account)
- Remove User from (Practice Management Software)
- Remove phone license
- Route this number to:______
- Remove Adobe license
- Does Wi-Fi password need to be changed?
- Remove User from (Web based Application #1)
- Remove User from (Web based Application #2)
- Notify (Vendor #1) to remove user
(Law Firm Tasks)
- Disable door key cards / change door access codes (if applicable)
Now, there are a lot of additional considerations when offboarding a user from the law firm side. However, this is the IT Checklist, as these considerations all impact the integrity of your systems (including physical access to the building).
This simple checklist can be tailored for your organization and used to immediately improve your employee onboarding and offboarding procedures. The entire exercise should take less than 30 minutes with your IT Provider and will undoubtedly save you countless hours and a lot of money.
It’s worth the effort!
Conclusion
You did it! I know that was a lot, but the fact that you’re making the extra effort to review this resource means you take the security of your firm seriously.
Here comes the inevitable plug. If your IT Provider has NOT discussed this with you and you think this system could work for you, please reach out. Level5 Management specialize in supporting law firms in Boca Raton, FL and we can ensure your firm is secure and your employees have the tools that they need to drive productivity and profitability. No more hitting a wall on Day 1!
