What a bad offboarding actually costs
There are two handovers I still think about. Both went wrong, and they went wrong in opposite directions.
The first was a national chapter. A lead stepped down, a new team came in, and somewhere in the middle nobody passed on the social media accounts. Not the passwords, not the recovery email, not the phone that received the login codes. The chapter went quiet on the channels where most of its members had found it in the first place. Getting back in took the better part of a year. That is a year of public voice, lost because of a login.
The second one bothers me more. One of the bigger teams I have worked with, a few dozen active volunteers. The lead had to step down and a new person took over. The documentation was genuinely good. Processes written up, decisions logged, files where you would expect to find them. I looked at all of it and thought my job here was done.
The new lead still struggled. Nobody had handed over the people.
Who do you call before a position goes public? Which member has quietly held the group together for two years? Which two people should not sit in the same working group? None of that was written down anywhere. It was not anyone's fault either.
Documents are the easy part
In a company, a new manager inherits some authority with the job. People turn up on Monday because they are paid to turn up.
We do not get that luxury. Our people are there because they believe in the mission, and because at some point somebody made them feel useful and seen. That feeling sits between two people. It does not transfer with a shared folder. So in a volunteer organisation, the relationship layer is the expensive part of a handover, more than it ever is in a business.
Protect things in the order they disappear
Here is the order I use now. It is roughly the order in which things vanish once someone leaves.
Named relationships. Every funder, partner, journalist or council contact who knew a person and not an inbox. Assume three to six months of lost momentum on each one.
Verbal commitments. The yes given in a corridor. The promised venue. The collaboration agreed on a call. Nobody wrote them down, so nobody can honour them.
Calendar knowledge. The grant deadline that repeats every March. The audit that needs papers in January. Miss one and you lose a whole cycle.
Access. Accounts, mailboxes, payment tools, the domain, the social channels. See story one.
Documents. Genuinely useful, and the thing least likely to go missing.
Most handovers run this list backwards. We pass on the documents because documents are easy to pass on. Then we hand over the logins if we remember. The relationships never get named at all, because nobody thinks of them as a thing you hand over.
What I would actually do
Two small moves, and neither of them takes a working group.
1️⃣ Ask the leaver for a list of names. Three to five people the successor emails in the first week. One line each on who they are and what was last agreed with them. That takes twenty minutes to write and it protects the most expensive item on the list above. Do it before the last week, because the last week is always chaos.
2️⃣ Put the handover in the role description at the start of the term. Not at the end, when it feels like a favour the leaver is doing on the way out. If someone accepted the job knowing the final two weeks have work attached, they do that work. People honour obligations they signed up for.
Where this helped me
Building HR for Volt Europa the most difficult part was keeping track of people, the above suggestions are steps I implemented in my automated handover process for team leads. You can read more about it here.
Your turn
Think of the last leader who left your organisation. What went with them that nobody had written down, and how long did it take before anyone noticed? Tell me in the comments.
Ermal Asllani
People Ops for Decentralised Organisations
Behind the Mission goes out every second week, on the people side of running a decentralised organisation.