Sapling - Offboarding An Existing Team Member

Introduction 

Sapling's Offboarding module ensures visibility of overall critical tasks for departing team members. 

Just like onboarding, you can create a consistent and repeatable process to ensure a smooth transition.

**Note: If you're offboarding an Admin or Super Admin, review this Checklist - Offboarding Admin/Super Admin

This article covers the following topics: 

• How to Offboard a Team Member
  • Step 1: Fill out the associated information for the team member to confirm offboarding
  • Step 2: Re-assign roles and active tasks.
  • Step 3: Assign an Offboarding workflow for any tasks that the team member needs to complete before their departure (optional)
  • Step 4: Schedule the offboarding email that outlines exit procedures. *note: click on the template to customize the email
• Offboarding vs. Deleting team member data
• Visibility of Offboarding Information
• How to cancel Offboarding

How to Offboard a Team Member

To initiate offboarding, navigate from Administration Tools > Dashboard. Click on "Offboard" in the upper-righthand corner.

*note: if you are a Manager and your HR Admin has given you Offboarding authority (to enable, see Manager Permission Levels) – you can start the offboarding process directly from your team member's profile.

Step 1: Fill out the associated information for the team member to confirm offboarding.

• Offboarding Template: Choose the desired offboarding profile template 
• Full Name: select team member you'd like to offboard
• Termination Type: voluntary, involuntary, or other
• Eligible For Rehire: yes, no, upon review
• Date of Termination: the official last date of employment
• Last Day Worked: used in relation to assigning tasks. Typically, this date is the same as the termination date - however, if needed can be adjusted (for ex: if an official termination date is Friday 1/15, but the last day worked is Wednesday 1/13, all offboarding tasks assigned to the employee will be completed in relation to 1/13)
• Access cut off: select when you'd like the employee to no longer to be able to access Sapling. Once their status is inactive, they will not have access to anything.
  By default, team member access will be removed at 5pm PST on the Termination Date (1am UTC on the next day). 

Step 2: Re-assign roles and active tasks.

• If a manager is offboarded, you can reassign their former direct reports to a new manager
• Active tasks can be reassigned to new task owners
• Workflow tasks can be removed or reassigned to other team members, keeping them within Sapling even after your former team member leaves the organization

Step 3: Assign an Offboarding workflow or document requests for any tasks/uploads/signatures the team member needs to complete before their departure (optional).

Step 4: For any email templates that were scheduled to send, you have the choice to delete them or you can let them still send. Schedule any additional offboarding email templates that also need to be sent. 

 

Offboarding vs. Deleting team member data

• Offboarding team members will keep their profile information. You'll be able to access the team member's information in the future and have visibility into the information that was on file.
• Deleting team members will remove their profile information from Sapling entirely as if they never existed. We do not recommend ever deleting a team member (unless in the case of an accidental duplicate account).

Visibility of Offboarding Information

To protect sensitive information, offboarding details are not visible to Employees or users with non-admin permissions, except for the team member’s direct and indirect Managers. This ensures that confidential offboarding-related data is only accessible to those who need it.

To further reduce potential confusion during the offboarding process, you can choose to hide offboarded team members from being searchable by non-admin users.
To enable this setting:

1. Go to Administration Tools
2. Navigate to Platform Settings > General
3. Scroll down and enable:
   “Hide inactive team members in the search bar from Managers and Employees”

This setting ensures that offboarded individuals do not appear in search results for non-admin users, helping maintain focus and clarity for remaining team members.

How to Cancel Offboarding

If you need to cancel an offboarding before the set termination date, follow these steps to reverse the action through the dashboard.

Steps to Cancel Offboarding

1. Access the Offboarding Dashboard
   Go to Administration Tools > Dashboard > Offboarding.
2. Locate the Offboarding Action
   Find the team member whose offboarding you want to cancel, click the Actions menu (three dots) next to their name, and select Cancel Offboarding.
3. If the Termination Date Has Passed
• First, change the termination date to today. You can do this by updating the Final Day field on the offboarding dashboard.
• Once updated, you can proceed to cancel the offboarding by following the steps above.

By following these steps, you can easily manage and reverse an offboarding if needed.