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The 4 step plan to managing employee onboarding and offboarding

When your company scales, you may want to welcome new employees into its fold. While this is certainly an exciting time for your business, it can place your IT team under strain. 

Failing to onboard and offboard your employees appropriately creates an unnecessary number of IT tasks. Fortunately, there are four clear steps you can take to successfully onboard and offboard employees.

Creating accounts ahead of their arrival

Don’t wait until your new employee’s first day to create the accounts they need to function. If you begin tasking IT with account creation on the day of each employee’s arrival, you’re forcing them into a disorganized way of working.

Instead, once your employees pass their usual referencing and security clearances, ask your IT team to create the accounts that are relevant to their role. Produce a generic password that they’ll be prompted to change on their first day. In doing so, you’ll cause fewer headaches for your IT staff and you’ll ensure a smooth transition for your new team member.

Briefing employees on app use and security

Try to find time during your employee’s induction period to brief them on how to use apps. If doing this in person isn’t possible, produce clear and concise manuals that they can use instead. Additionally, make sure you educate new employees on cybersecurity measures during their onboarding

By helping new employees learn how to use apps, you reduce the number of tickets they need to open. Additionally, you prevent them from making mistakes that could cost your company money. Cybersecurity briefings are especially important as human error plays a big role in breaches. Around 95 percent of cybersecurity breaches involve human error, so you can curtail a lot of problems by educating your employees.

Using a password vault

Around 11 percent of people reuse passwords across all accounts and 49 percent reuse them across accounts that aren’t high-risk. Unfortunately, neither behavior is conducive to good security. Therefore, you need to encourage your employees to use a different password for each account. That password shouldn’t be a numerical variation of their usual password, either.

Naturally, this could result in your new employee forgetting their password and opening multiple reset tickets. If you hire lots of new employees, your IT team will soon be snowed under with this simple request. By giving your new hires access to a password vault from day one, you help them stay safe while remaining productive.

Revoking access and when to do it

When the time comes for an employee to go elsewhere, you need to revoke access quickly. Ideally, you’ll do this from the day they leave your organization. Make sure your IT team knows to schedule such tasks as each day of unauthorized access poses a security risk.

In addition to revoking access when an employee leaves a company, review their access if their job role changes. Reviewing access when an employee moves laterally or gets a promotion is a useful way to remain compliant within your industry. By maintaining strict levels of access control, you close some of the loopholes a cybercriminal could use to exploit your systems.

By following these four simple steps, onboarding and offboarding your employees should become easier. In addition to helping your team remain productive, it’s a dependable way to avoid the security breaches that could cost your business a lot of money.