Excellence model - Offboarding

To be excellent in having the right competencies available at the right time, you need to be excellent in reaching out in the market and finding the perfect person for the right price, but you also need to be excellent in making that person leave the organization again.

Offboarding an external contractor has an administrative aspect, but also a knowledge aspect, and it is essential to enable the organization to build upon the work the contractor has done.

The administrative aspect is rather simple, but often it is not done and in these cases, a burden of irrelevant data is built in systems and administration processes leading to complexity in the organization. 

To handle the administrative part of the offboarding you need a link to the onboarding process and ensure that the contractor is removed from all systems and administrative processes that they were onboarded on. It must be clear in the organization who is responsible for doing this.

A challenge using the external workforce is the loss of knowledge that happens when a given contractor leaves the organization, and some completely avoid using the external workforce because of this. 

To minimize the knowledge loss it is important to consider this aspect from the beginning of the period and ensure that the knowledge and experience from the contractor is anchored in the organization among permanent employees. This is partly done by ensuring that the contractor is not acting in isolation, but is an integrated part of a team, and it is partly done by ensuring that the contractor is documenting her work as an ongoing process

Even with a high degree of continuous knowledge transfer, there needs to be a formal handover process when the contractor is leaving. The organization should have a template for this that the individual department and projects can use as a starting point.

It is almost always possible to make an agreement with the contractor, that she can be contacted in case of questions related to the work of the contractor. In many situations, it also makes sense to make a flexible agreement with the contractor, e.g. a certain amount of hours, that can be used on an ad-hoc basis whenever needed.

The purpose of contractors is to have temporary expert knowledge or temporary execution power. It can be a smart decision to have an external contractor for long periods, but it then needs to be a conscious decision then.

Therefore you need to have an overview of contractors that have been part of the organization for longer than a defined period, and ensure that a conscious decision is taken whether the given contractor should stay or leave the organization.

You can read more about the phases here: 

If you want to talk about how we can help to enable your organization to be excellent in sourcing external workforce, then book a meeting directly in our calendar below: