There are several offboarding best practices involved in transitioning an employee out of a company, whether they leave voluntarily or not. From a tech perspective, MSPs hold considerable responsibility in ensuring that this process is airtight. To be fair, that goes for onboarding as well.
“Doing this right is one of the real fundamentals of being in our business,” said Michael Gavaghen, vice president of management solutions at I.T. Solutions of South Florida Inc., an MSP based in Hypoluxo, FL. “I can’t think of anything that could be more damaging to a client relationship than missing somebody’s termination date and time.”
Offboarding Your Clients’ Employees
Michael Gavaghen
One of the ground rules in offboarding clients’ employees is prioritizing this task, according to Gavaghen. If, for example, a customer notifies the MSP that they will be terminating an employee at five o’clock on Friday, the engineer assigned to that ticket needs to be on standby.
This necessitates a competent service team. “The people who dispatch for us, and the people who do our engineer assignments understand how critical that type of ticket is,” Gavaghen explained. “They make sure the engineer it’s been assigned to doesn’t have a conflicting issue going on during the time he or she has got to be pulling the plug.”
Scheduled terminations tend to be amicable. Sudden terminations—when an employee walks off the job, or when a sudden confrontation leads to that employee being fired on the spot—are trickier, noted Jeff Hanson, president of Trust I.T., an MSP based in Baton Rouge, LA.
“When clients are giving us a user separation, we ask them: is it contentious?” Hanson explained. “We want to know: what time do you want us to pull the trigger?” In these cases, oftentimes the customer will give the go-ahead as they’re walking into the termination meeting with the employee in question. At the MSP, “everybody needs to be aware: this thing is coming, but don’t do it until we get that call.”
Managing Forgetful Clients
One of the challenges that MSPs face is when clients don’t notify them of an employee termination, Gavaghen shared.
Consider this scenario: a client’s employee quits suddenly at five o’clock on a Friday evening. Their manager—in a hurry to get on with their weekend—doesn’t notify the MSP until Monday morning, leaving that company’s network vulnerable for over 72 hours.
“There’s nothing that we really can do about that until we see if there’s something anomalous going on,” Gavaghen said.
In this case, the MSP needs to rely on data loss protection tools that detect and block large exports of intellectual property and customer data, for example. “If we have set it up, on the security side, to recognize data export in any sort of massive size it should, by rule, shut that down,” Gavaghen said.
Offboarding Employees at Your MSP
It’s equally critical to follow employee offboarding best practices in your own operation.
Jeff Hanson
Hanson explains that employee offboarding in this context is a more complex process, simply because of the number of accounts techs have access to. These may include RSS (remote monitoring and management) systems, antivirus platforms, cybersecurity platforms, and any number of cloud vendors. It’s a much longer list than the average customer’s, whose employees may have access to only a few applications, such as Microsoft 365, a spam and virus filter, and the address book on a copier, for example.
To streamline employee offboarding, Gavaghen pointed out the importance of a credential management tool. This provides easy access to a departing employee’s credentials, including access to client systems. It’s also necessary to shut down any access the individual had remotely or from a mobile environment.
Gavaghen added that MSPs should have their employees sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) when they’re hired to prevent them from divulging either company or client secrets when they leave.
“A lot of these things have to be done beforehand,” Gavaghen said. “This work takes place well before the employee decides they need to leave, or before you decide they need to leave.”
Maintaining Process Discipline
Employee offboarding—for clients or at your MSP—becomes problematic when channel pros don’t follow an established process. This is why Gavaghen emphasized that MSPs should comply with the guidelines laid out by organizations like CIS (Center for Internet Security) and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and avoid taking shortcuts.
“If you don’t have the internal process discipline to adhere to these standards, that’s when the problems arise,” Gavaghen said. “It’s tempting to sidestep things when you’re stressed out by how busy you are, but that’s when it’s especially important that you enforce these standards.”
