When someone leaves: an offboarding checklist for work chat
The QuiC team · · 4 min read
Email and laptops get switched off on an employee's last day. Chat usually doesn't. Here is a practical checklist for closing chat access when someone leaves, and how QuiC handles each step.
Most companies have an offboarding routine. On the last day the email account is disabled, the laptop comes back and the door badge stops working. Then there is chat, which is where the customer conversations, vendor quotes and internal decisions actually live, and which often isn't on the list at all.
This post is a checklist for closing chat access properly when someone leaves, whichever tool you use. At the end we explain how QuiC handles each step.
Why chat gets missed
Chat tends to grow from the bottom up. Someone starts a group with a customer, adds two colleagues, and a year later it is the main channel for that account. Nobody in IT created it, so nobody in IT knows to close it.
On a personal messaging app this is worse, for three reasons:
- The group belongs to whoever created it. If that person leaves, the company has no way to take the group over.
- The history lives on personal phones. A former employee keeps every message, file and contact they ever received.
- Nobody can see who is still in. A former employee can sit in a vendor group for months, and you only find out when something goes wrong.
None of this needs bad intent to cause harm. A shared price list or a forwarded customer complaint is enough.
The checklist
Use this for every leaver, including contractors and agency staff.
- Remove the person from the workspace on their last day. Not from each group one by one: from the organisation, so that access ends everywhere at once.
- Remove their devices. Phones, laptops and browsers that were signed in should stop receiving messages straight away, including a personal phone they used for work.
- Hand over the groups they ran. Make someone else the owner or admin of each customer and vendor group before the account is closed.
- Tell external contacts who their new contact is. Customers should not keep writing to someone who has left.
- Check shared links and guest access. Meeting links, invite links and external guests that the person created may outlive them.
- Write down what you did. If a customer or auditor asks later who had access and until when, you need a record, not a recollection.
- Review it quarterly. Compare the member list against the HR list. Leavers slip through when a manager forgets to tell anyone.
If your current tool can't do steps 1, 2 and 6 from one place, that is the gap to fix first.
Lost phones are the same problem
A lost or stolen phone is an unplanned offboarding of a device. The steps are the same: remove the device so it stops receiving messages, and record that you did. It should take a minute and should not depend on the employee still having the phone.
How QuiC handles it
In QuiC the workspace belongs to the organisation, not to whoever created a group.
- Remove a user and their access ends. Deactivating someone in the admin console removes their access on every device they were signed in on.
- Remove a device and its keys are retired. That device stops receiving messages. This works for a lost phone as well as a leaver's phone.
- End every session with one switch. If something more serious happens, an admin can end every signed-in session across the organisation.
- The audit log records who changed what. Removing a user or a device is an admin change like any other, so there is a record to show an auditor.
- Your directory can do it for you. On the Business plan, SCIM provisioning lets your identity provider add and remove QuiC users automatically when someone joins or leaves.
None of this weakens the encryption. Messages and attachments in QuiC are end-to-end encrypted with the Signal Protocol, and one-to-one and group calls are end-to-end encrypted on current apps. Admin control is over who is in the workspace, not over reading what people said. The exceptions are set out in full in the Privacy Policy.
Where to start this week
Pick the last three people who left your company and check whether they are still in any customer or vendor group. Most teams find at least one. That one finding is usually enough to get offboarding for chat onto the HR checklist.
If you run your team on WhatsApp groups today, this post explains what to look for in a replacement, and the QuiC and WhatsApp Business comparison sets the two side by side. Plans start at ₹99 per user per month: see pricing.