Every business has an onboarding routine, even an informal one. New person, new laptop, new accounts. Offboarding is where the discipline falls apart. Someone leaves, the goodbye cake gets eaten, and their accounts quietly live on for months.
Those leftover accounts are one of the most common findings when we review a new client’s environment. Former employees with working email. Shared passwords never rotated after a departure. A sales rep from two years ago whose login still opens the CRM.
The checklist
Same day as the departure:
- Disable the identity, not just the email. Their Microsoft 365 or Google account is the key to everything else. Disable it first and the rest follows.
- Rotate anything shared. Wi-Fi passwords, shared logins, door codes, the social media accounts everyone forgot they had access to.
- Redirect, then archive, their mailbox. Bounce nothing. Customers who email a former employee should reach a current one.
- Recover the hardware and wipe it. The laptop in a former employee’s closet is a data breach waiting for a burglary.
- Check for personal forwarding rules. Departing employees sometimes forward mail to personal accounts before leaving. Look.
Make it automatic
The reason this fails is that it depends on someone remembering during an awkward week. The fix is making it procedure: HR notifies IT, IT runs the list, someone signs off. For our managed clients, this is one email to us and it is handled.
Book a free consultation if you would like the leavers handled properly, every time.