Modernize Offboarding with a Workforce Transition Platform
It’s easy to see why HR teams are increasingly interested in digital transformation. By transitioning to data-driven technologies, many HR departments have been able to eliminate manual, heavily administrative tasks—resulting in improved efficiency, stronger governance, and a greater ability to prioritize strategic goals. However, there’s a critical area that remains absent from the discussion: workforce transitions, particularly the need for technology to modernize offboarding tasks.
Workforce transitions include the processes organizations use to manage employee movement into, within, and out of the company, most notably during layoffs, restructurings, and role eliminations. Offboarding technology is one component of a workforce transition platform—which helps companies manage employee movement with consistency, compliance, and scale.
Many companies are actively reshaping their workforces, in large part due to the adoption of AI. As companies reinvent the way they do business, hiring has slowed and layoffs have increased. With workforce reductions on the rise, companies should evaluate the way they manage employee exits.
In this article, we’ll highlight some of the benefits of using a workforce transition platform, leveraging advanced offboarding technology to streamline document generation, severance package management, and complex cross-team workflows. If you want to focus on strategic initiatives without increasing headcount, it’s time to invest in a workforce transition platform.
Why Digitize Offboarding?
First, let’s talk about why companies are leaning into HR technology more than ever before and how they can achieve the same benefits by modernizing offboarding with technology. When HR functions are centralized through technology, companies commonly see these benefits:
Efficient use of resources by eliminating duplicative and/or manual work
Consistent and standardized processes that are easy to replicate, leading to greater efficiency and equitable employee treatment
Mitigation of legal risk by facilitating compliance with labor laws and regulations
Real-time insights for professionals throughout the organization, facilitating coordination across disparate teams
More time for strategic HR initiatives by reducing time spent on administrative tasks that could be automated
A growing number of companies are using technology at the beginning of the employment lifecycle for tasks like recruitment, hiring, and onboarding—yet the final stage of the lifecycle often lacks comparable offboarding technology. Whether technology is used to screen résumés or finalize new-hire paperwork and documentation, the result is a more efficient experience for applicants and HR teams alike. Digitizing workforce transitions delivers the same efficiency, consistency, and compliance benefits, yet dedicated offboarding technology remains underutilized.
Many other routine employment tasks have benefited from digital transformation, like payroll/benefits management and increased employee self-service capabilities. These improvements enable employees to access information and make changes without assistance from HR professionals. While payroll and benefits have embraced automation, offboarding processes, including severance management, are still frequently managed through manual coordination and fragmented systems.
These technologies make it easier for companies to remain agile and competitive, and they lead to better employee experiences. So, why not adopt the same approach to offboarding—one of the most sensitive HR tasks?
Offboarding Technology = Better Outcomes
Recent years have demonstrated just how much technology can transform HR processes, yet many companies are behind the curve when it comes to employee exits. A workforce transition platform used for offboarding helps companies coordinate across teams/locations, standardize processes, mitigate risk, and improve the employee exit experience—all while preserving brand reputation.
Here are some of the benefits of using dedicated offboarding technology within a workforce transition platform.
Visibility and Tracking
Offboarding technology provides greater visibility into what’s happening across the entire organization, which is especially pertinent for companies with multiple HR teams or those that require cross-department collaboration with colleagues in Legal, Finance, and IT. With data centralization, Onwards HR users across the globe can access real-time information about event status, leading to better planning, forecasting, and coordination.
Standardized Processes
Standardized processes enable organizations to maintain consistency across locations while promoting equitable employee treatment. By using a workforce transition platform, companies benefit from custom workflows that ensure offboarding tasks are handled in the proper order. This helps companies avoid accidental administrative errors, like Amazon’s unfortunate mistake last month, when an accidental calendar invite—including language about job cuts—was sent and recalled the day before the company laid off 16,000 employees.
Legal Compliance
Dedicated offboarding technology within a workforce transition platform also facilitates adherence to laws governing employee separations. For example, in the U.S., Onwards HR’s robust data functionality helps employers evaluate for WARN and Mini-WARN Act applicability, as well as identify bias and potentially discriminatory trends. Offboarding technology supports global employers as they navigate the complexity of provincial and statutory severance pay requirements.
Risk Mitigation
In addition to the compliance risks above, implementing a workforce transition platform minimizes data-related errors and promotes uniformity and accuracy in severance calculations. For example, Onwards HR’s severance automation technology can be configured based on corporate policies, geography-specific laws, and union requirements, simplifying the calculation of severance. A meticulous process also helps companies avoid other offboarding risks, like losing top talent due to lack of coordination or exposing themselves to potential intellectual property theft.
Time and Cost Savings
By developing more efficient, well-governed processes, HR teams have more time to focus on strategic initiatives. On top of improving employee bandwidth, digitizing workforce transitions leads to significant cost savings, as demonstrated in this case study.
Capabilities: A Quick Look
Onwards HR’s compliance-focused workforce transition platform simplifies the many complexities of offboarding. These capabilities streamline processes, prevent legal disputes, and preserve brand reputation by improving the employee exit experience.
Automated Severance Calculations
Ensure accurate severance pay based on tenure, position, corporate policies, and statutory requirements
Eliminate manual calculations and reduce human error
Easily recalculate severance amounts if termination dates change
Compliance and Regulatory Adherence
Consistently apply geography-specific labor and employment laws
Analyze separation data for consistency with the U.S. WARN and Mini-WARN Acts, including state separation notice compliance
Evaluate offboarding practices for potential discrimination
Auto-generate compliant separation agreements according to corporate policy
Centralized Data Management
Securely store and access employee offboarding data
Enable cross-department collaboration between HR, Finance, and Legal teams
Provide real-time business insights and reporting (e.g., status, accruals)
Seamless Document Generation and Distribution
Automate employee-tailored offboarding documentation and collect e-signatures
Provide a coordinated, transparent offboarding experience
Summary
As companies reimagine their HR processes, workforce transitions should be top of mind. As a company, we’ve been fortunate to witness these digital transformations first-hand. Change management is sometimes a concern when adopting new technology, but our customers attest to the immediate return on investment after implementing Onwards HR.
“Onwards HR has helped us create an automated and streamlined severance process. It allows us to focus more on the employee experience in their exit versus the administration. The severance is calculated automatically within the system and creates the severance agreements dynamically.”
At Onwards HR, we believe there’s a better way to say goodbye. What are you waiting for?
