When a team member departs, your first instinct might be to panic. The workload on their plate will have to be redistributed (and your employees have enough on their collective dockets as it is), their clients will need to be communicated with, and you’ll have to ensure that their absence doesn’t cause a landslide of departures. Moreover, you may have lost a valuable skill set. While nobody is necessarily irreplaceable in the corporate world, your former employee will likely have had years of experience working within your workflow and systems that a new hire just won’t have.

Whatever your unique situation, employee departures tend to splash throughout organizations, and seasoned business owners will want to still as many ripples as they can. With that in mind, here are some strategies that we hope will prove useful as you attempt to mitigate your losses, protect your business, and attract new talent.

Understanding the “Why”

When an employee decides to depart, the first and most important thing you can do is sit down with them to find out why. Exit interviews are open forums where your soon-to-be former employee can speak their mind, shed some light on the reasons they’re leaving, and give you the tools necessary to stem further departures before they occur. It’s a professional back-and-forth that allows the employee to evaluate their experience with the company, highlights potential areas of growth for the employer, and ensures both parties leave on good terms.

However, the value of an exit interview is almost entirely dependent on the questions you, as the employer, ask. With that in mind, here are some questions that you can ask to gather actionable intel from your employee:

  • Why are you leaving? This question cuts to the heart of the issue quickly and allows you to isolate “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” as it were.
  • Are there any areas of growth, from your perspective, that we can work on? This allows your employee room to speak freely about fractures in their daily workflow – areas where your processes could be refined to provide better experiences for the remaining staff.
  • How have relationships been with coworkers and management? This isolates potential areas of conflict within the office, and allows you to proactively heal fractures in your team.
  • Did this position (responsibility and compensation) align with your expectations? You can use the answers given here to refine the responsibilities and compensation for their role, making it potentially more attractive to new hires.
  • Did this role take you where you want to go in your career? This helps you understand possible areas where the role could grow, and provides an opportunity for polite networking before the employee leaves.

The intel you get from this exit interview is often very useful, even if sometimes unpleasant to hear. Taking steps to actively and visibly improve on low-lift suggestions can be a huge boost to employee morale, even as you pivot toward addressing some of the larger, not-as-easy-to-resolve concerns.

Ensure a Smooth Transition

The next immediate concern is making sure your employee transitions out as smoothly as possible. Of course, their departure impacts several aspects of your operations, so taking a moment to plan and make sure they’re all covered is the surest way to keep things smooth sailing. Make sure that:

  • Knowledge transfer occurs between the departing employee and the employees who will take on their workload. Setting time aside for the departees to brief their colleagues on the requirements of their position, the systems they use, and the tips and tricks they leverage to provide stellar service will help things run smoothly in their absence.
  • Data is secured and permissions are revoked. Even if it’s unintentional, the departure of an employee can inevitably lead to the loss of essential company data. Prevent data or security loss in the first place by installing multi-factor authentication, and accounting for any hard file copies or drives before the employee leaves.
  • Communicate the departure to clients, establish communication between clients and their new representatives, and adjust deadlines based on what can feasibly be accomplished.

These steps must be either performed or are ready to deploy before your employee departs, not after. Failing to perform any of these steps before their final day could decrease morale, cause confusion throughout operations, and even cause you to hemorrhage clients who could otherwise be kept happy.

Performing an exit interview, implementing suggested changes, and taking steps to ensure a smooth transition of responsibilities will help keep your organization chugging along toward your intended goals — even with one less passenger.

Beau Peters is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest with a passion for purpose-driven business content.