We certainly wish for you a high staff retention rate, but turnover happens at all companies. Some employees move on, and when that happens, it’s important you take action to protect your company and its reputation. After all, everything you do is marketing, and we want the very best competency and credibility for your business moving forward.
Why Does It Matter?
Digital marketing is all about building relationships, and leads can potentially reach out to anyone on your team at any time. You want all information about your business to be relevant and up-to-date, including your team contacts and what is shared about them in relation to your company. Having past employee information listed on your website, social media, and other places can result in lost leads if customers reach out to them and it doesn’t get passed along.
You want to avoid negative association – disgruntled and negative behavior of former employees can reflect badly on your reputation, and it’s just a best practice to do what you can to avoid the situation altogether. Most of the time this doesn’t happen, but being prepared provides peace of mind. There are five main things we recommend you consider, so you’re prepared when employees leave your organization.
5 Things to Consider & What to Do:
- Make sure you have social media guidelines in place for your organization. Have employees review while employed, and refresh from time to time to make sure they stay relevant.
- Ask employee as part of their exit process to remove your company as their current employer from all social media platforms, while still at your company. LinkedIn and Facebook are especially important.
- Create a plan for their email – set an auto-responder for their company email address and forward to another staff who knows to monitor and reply to inquiries.
- Update your website and other company materials that list the employee and their contact information.
- Update and remove their social media access to your organization’s accounts/pages.
Social Media Access Updates
- When removing administrative access on all social media accounts, be careful to make sure there are at least two other people from your organization with full admin access before doing so.
- Change your social media account passwords.
- Change the password for the email addresses associated with your social media and/or digital marketing accounts (If they have access to the admin email, they can change the password).
- Use a new password, and use different passwords for each account.
- We recommend setting up two-factor authentication when possible, especially for Facebook.
Special LinkedIn Tip:
Do you have past employees still linked to your company page? If so, it will appear on LinkedIn that they currently work at your organization, but that is no longer accurate. This can be changed.
- First, message that former employee and ask them to remove your company from their profile. If they agree, don’t assume they know how or where to do this. Provide simple steps. They can edit in the “experience” section and uncheck the box next to “I currently work here,” add in their last day details and click “Save.”
- If that doesn’t work, you can try removing the employee by submitting a request to LinkedIn Customer Service. Fill out the Contact Form with their complete details. We suggest including the date of their last day of employment.
- Some newer company pages have an icon next to each employee’s profile page listed on the company page. If you click the icon – it will begin the “Report profile position” process.
- Note: Make sure you have a confirmed company email address when making the request to edit information for your company.
These steps are best practices to complete whenever an employee leaves your organization. It may feel harsh taking these actions when someone leaves on good terms, but they are simply security steps to protect the organization. It is also good for the employee to share accurate information with people to support their own reputation. They may actually be relieved and appreciate the advice and cleanup process. They probably don’t need or want notifications about your organization on social media when it is no longer their responsibility. Take a look at your current process for when an employee leaves your organization and add these steps to the procedure. We hope you don’t need to use these steps for a long time, but simply save them for whenever needed.
