When an Employee Leaves: What to Handle on the Technology Side
An employee leaves.
Do you know every system they can still log into?
In most small businesses, the answer is no. Not because anyone is careless, but because nobody owns the process.
Here's the thing most offboarding advice misses: removing access and preserving the business's information are two different tasks. A former employee's email might contain months of client correspondence your team still needs. Their files might hold the only copy of an ongoing project. Disabling everything without a plan creates one set of problems. Leaving everything active creates another.
The better approach starts with three questions:
Who inherits this person's work?
What access needs to stop today?
What business information needs to stay available?
A short, repeatable process built around those questions turns a stressful moment into a manageable one.
New post on the blog covers the three things to get right when someone leaves your team.
What to Set Up Before Your New Hire's First Day
Your new employee starts Monday.
Is everything they need actually ready?
In most small businesses, there's no single person whose job it is to think about technology setup for a new hire. So it gets improvised. Someone scrambles to create an email account. A shared login gets passed along "for now." Security steps get skipped because there's not enough time.
That's not a failure. It's what happens when nobody owns the process.
The fix isn't complicated. It's a short set of decisions made before day one:
Does this person have their own email and their own login to every system?
Is two-step verification set up before they start, not "whenever they get around to it"?
Does the device they're using meet a basic standard?
Is any of this written down?
The difference between a first day that works and one that doesn't isn't budget. It's whether someone thought through the steps ahead of time.
What Changes When You Stop Waiting for Things to Break
Most small businesses handle IT the same way.
Something breaks. Someone fixes it. Everyone moves on.
There is nothing wrong with that approach. It is how almost every business starts.
But as the team grows, a few things start to shift:
Every time you call for help, the person on the other end is starting from scratch. No history. No context. No idea what changed since last time.
Nobody is watching for the small issues that quietly build into big ones.
And IT costs become impossible to predict. A quiet month costs nothing. A bad month is three emergency invoices plus a lost afternoon.
The core difference with managed support is not more technology. It is that someone is paying attention between the emergencies.