In managing your staff, there’s no time like the present to make sure that your people feel safe. We have undergone a seismic shift from meeting in a boardroom to meeting on Zoom, and we have had to relearn to manage teams remotely by working hard to amplify a culture of trust. So many factors are out of our control. Fatigue as well as shifts in meaning and purpose and the realignment of values are exacerbated by this ambiguous, chaotic environment.

What hasn’t changed, is that your organisation is the social environment your employees journey through, which includes attracting them in the first place, their onboarding experience, performance and development, and finally their exit from the company. At each stage, your task is to foster trust so that your staff feel safe and rewarded.

The knock-on effect when an employee resigns

When an employee resigns, it is normal to react with shock, disappointment or even anger and guilt. Why? Change is hard. It might indicate a breakdown in a work relationship, trouble in the organisation, or simply a better opportunity. It also means that the journey of attracting new talent, hiring and onboarding will start all over again. What’s more, this process brings extra work for HR and managers, introduces uncertainty and takes attention away from getting the actual job done.

As a leader and manager of people, it’s important to be aware of your own trigger points when this happens. That said, it is critical to continue building a relationship with the person who has resigned, up to the exit interview and until their last day with the company.

This might be easier said than done, especially if the exit interview and offboarding process will be done via Zoom. These three suggestions will help to make the most of remote offboarding.

1. Keep cameras on
It is simple – the more visual input we have of people’s expressions, eyes, gestures and body language, the more information we have to make decisions about trust and safety. Cameras off makes it more likely that our nervous systems default to a threat state.

2. Give it (quality) time
Although it may seem futile to spend time on a person who will no longer be working at the company, intentional strategic offboarding processes ensure that employees get a valuable closing experience that is consistent with your brand, is considerate and warm (read: safe) and creates hooks for future connections to top talent. Boomeranging employees are on the rise. Plus, today’s employee could be tomorrow’s client. Creating a win-win departure is non-negotiable.

3. Use David Rock’s SCARF model
This is a superb tool to get to grips with an exiting employee’s motivations. Used as a guideline to discover systemic issues in managing people’s needs, it can reveal opportunities to help existing staff to experience higher levels of job fulfilment in future.

What is the SCARF model?

SCARF stands for the five key domains that influence our behaviour in social situations and activate the same threat/reward responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. The acronym stands for:

• Status: our relative importance to others
• Certainty: our ability to predict the future
• Autonomy: our sense of control over events
• Relatedness: how safe we feel with others
• Fairness: how fair we perceive the exchanges between people to be

Stress in an offboarding process is predictable, and when managing an employee’s exit, you are at the helm of dealing with the fallout from all stakeholders. Offboarding an employee virtually can make it difficult to create trust, given the absence of non-verbal cues. Using the SCARF model as part of your exit interview structure will help to maximise positive feelings for both parties.

Perhaps the most important reason for doing offboarding and exit interviews right, though, is that your brand goes with a departing employee.

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