Every employer has to deal with staff leaving. Sometimes it’s best for the employee to move on whether it’s for family reasons or because he or she wants to grow professionally. Sometimes, you may find that you have a few challenges going on internally. Nonetheless, as the manager, you should ensure your employee’s offboarding process is as smooth as possible. A successful offboarding can not only benefit you, but the exiting employee as well. Let’s explore a few of strategies that will ensure a successful offboarding- starting with the opportunity to receive feedback.

To remain relevant organizations of all sizes must stay agile in order to respond to market changes. Planning is essential to keeping competitive edges sharp with knowledge leaders, the talent, in the right place at the right time.

As a consultant, I often go to organizations and provide advice and counsel to leaders at varying levels in the organization. For a good number of clients, that advice is at the management level and higher, and I don’t have regular communication with non-supervisory employees. So while visiting a client site a few days ago, I was in the break room getting something to drink, and happened to strike up a conversation with an [non-supervisory] employee about the political primary. We held a pretty robust conversation for a few minutes, and near the end, he looked at me and said, “Who ARE you”? It caught me off guard, and frankly I found it quite amusing. But in thinking back about the conversation, I realized that this is a question that people struggle with all of the time. So it got me thinking about human communication, and what we are REALLY saying when we communicate.

At some point or another while running your business, you unfortunately will likely need to let someone go, also referred to as a separation or termination of employment. Typically, businesses run into these reasons because either they are cutting costs or have someone performing poorly at their job. Majority of states across the nation, are at-will, meaning they have the right to separate employment at any time. However there are some caveats, therefore your Human Resources team should always keep detailed records to justify the decision to ensure that employee’s rights are not violated and to ensure all federal and state laws are followed during the process.

As a consultant, I am often asked by my clients, “How can I identify employee relations tension before it becomes a company-wide endemic?" Why am I asked this so often? Because employee relations are difficult to assess...