Quite a few headlines over the past few years imply that companies can’t do much about how often they lose talent. The economy and the labor market will fluctuate, but by and large, organizations have more power than they tend to realize. 

Yes, employees will always come and go. But how often that happens and how much it costs your company depends quite a bit on your onboarding and offboarding experience. And if you’re already using Microsoft 365 but you’re not using it to help optimize your employee lifecycle, you’re not getting the ROI you’re already paying for. So in this blog, I’ll explore how to get more out of Microsoft 365 than you might have thought possible. But first, let’s get a sense of what poor onboarding and offboarding cost.

Recent Onboarding Statistics 

Here are just a few eye-opening statistics that make the case for better employee lifecycle management right from the start: 

• 1 in 3 new hires will leave a job in the first 90 days
• 70% of new hires decide whether or not a job is a good fit in the first month
• Only 43% of employees receive more than a 1-day orientation and a benefits packet 
• 32% of employees find their onboarding process confusing, and 22% find it disorganized
• 80% of employees who feel undertrained plan to leave soon 

Recent Offboarding Statistics

Offboarding stats are also anything but rosy: 

• 76% of IT execs believe that employee offboarding is a significant security threat
• Just 45% of offboarded employees were satisfied with their exit process 
• 20% of businesses have experienced data breaches because of a former employee
• At 48% of businesses, former employees still have access to internal systems

So neither onboarding nor offboarding stats look good. But if you’re like me, you see some low-hanging fruit that could make a significant difference to your talent retention rates as well as your risk profile. If there were a tool you already had that also made it exceptionally easy to gather that fruit, you’d want to know about it, right? Good. 

Onboarding With Microsoft 365

If you use Microsoft 365 but haven’t taken advantage of any of these features, it’s time to start! 

Simplify Access Management With Entra ID

As soon as your new hire is added to your HR system and Microsoft Entra ID, they will gain immediate access to critical apps, files, and resources they need without needing multiple logins.

Create a Comprehensive Digital HQ 

You can use SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams to create a knowledge hub for your company, so new hires can easily access your policies, procedures, and training materials and go through them at their own pace. 

Simplify Communication 

Microsoft 365's suite of collaboration tools makes it easy for new employees to get quick answers with real-time messaging, video conferencing, and document collaboration — without having to learn multiple new communication tools and constantly toggle around. 

Your Microsoft 365 Offboarding Checklist 

Here’s how Microsoft 365 can help you protect sensitive data when an employee leaves.

1. Quickly Secure Account Access

Remove session tokens and disable account access in one spot.  With proper configuration, the majority of data and application access can be removed with one click of a button.

2. Preserve Their Mailbox Data

Configuring data classification, data loss prevention, and retention policies will assure access to Exchange Online email and OneDrive files even if the employee deleted data just prior to departure.

3. Manage Their Mobile Device Access Through InTune

Microsoft’s mobile device management tool, Intune, makes it easy to wipe company data and apps from a smart device without affecting anything else. It can also block access to any company resources going forward and unenroll the device from future management. 

4. Ensure Business Continuity After the Employee Lifecycle

Now that your data is protected, it’s time to delegate. Set up email forwarding to designated team members, or you may wish to convert an individual mailbox into a shared one. 

5. Transfer Other Digital Assets

If your ex-employee had important documents and other files in OneDrive, that content should be transferred to a different employee’s drive or to a shared location. Similarly, you’ll want to transfer any important tasks or appointments in Outlook. 

6. Manage Their Licenses 

Remove your M365 license from your ex-employee through the M365 admin center.

7. Delete Their Accounts 

Only after key data is safely transferred should you delete an ex-employee’s accounts. 

Simplify the Computer Experience With Intune and Autopilot

Microsoft makes it much easier to deploy new employee devices and makes other onboarding and onboarding tasks simple. 

Device Orchestration - Onboarding and Offboarding

The next time you add an employee and need to provision them a new device, here’s what you can do with Entra, Intune, and Autopilot:

• Use zero-touch setup to configure devices from anywhere according to company-specific settings, applications, and security policies 
• Provide a customized experience for your organization’s users 
• Automate enrollment of the device in Microsoft Intune 

Entra and Intune make securing a recently departed employee's device incredibly fast.  Here's how:

• You can remotely wipe and automatically reset devices to a default configuration 
• Should you need to, you can also get detailed reports on a device’s activities quickly

With an upgrade to the Entra Suite licensing, automate the entire process with onboarding and offboarding workflows.

• For onboarding, automatically install relevant apps and customize settings based on a staff member’s role
• For offboarding, you can automate real-time separation instantly, on-demand using offboarding workflows using Identity Lifecycle Management task sequence automation
  
  

Simplifying Microsoft License Management

I often find that many of the business owners I talk to aren’t getting the ROI they deserve, and that’s not because Microsoft 365 isn’t offering sufficient value. On the contrary, it’s an extraordinarily sophisticated, flexible, and powerful platform, but those characteristics go hand-in-hand with complexity. 

Not only do we offer free Microsoft licensing assessments to make sure you’re optimizing this incredible resource, but we also can help make it easier to simplify the basics — like managing your subscriptions through our user-friendly portal. 

If you already know that you need additional help securing and optimizing your Microsoft environment, our new ACE365 services might be the right-sized IT help you’re looking for. 

Either way, click here to learn a little bit more about what our Microsoft experts bring to the table!