What if an employee is leaving the university or changing departments?
Before an employee leaves
While employees do transfer to other departments or leave the university outright, the business of your department and the university must progress. If you have a single employee serving as the point of contact for one or multiple departments, without proper preparation, transitioning to new staff can be difficult. Here are some things to consider doing to make staff transitions easier before you have a problem:
- Use a departmental group account as the primary email point of contact for your unit. This way, the group account can be reassigned easily without changing contact information (such as email addresses) on public Web sites. For more information, visit the Knowledge Base document How do I request a departmental or group account?
- Ensure that your unit has a public Web site that is easily searchable by your department’s name and appears near the top of the results list in common search engines such as Google.
- Keep an updated list of contact information (including telephone, email, postal mail address, and fax) on your public Web site.
As soon as you know an employee is leaving or changing departments:
- Collect written resignation letter from the departing employee
- Have the departing employee enable his or her out-of-office auto-reply with relevant information about the departure date and the new contact information. This will not limit the departing employee’s ability to receive/send mail, but will begin to let others know of the upcoming transition
- Have the employee gather his or her list of external contacts, and begin emailing each of them to inform them of the transition. The email message should provide the name/email of the new contact or temporary contact until a new employee is hired
- Update the contact information on your department’s public Web site to reflect the new contact or temporary contact until a new employee is hired
- Ask departing employee to begin moving all critical office documents from his or her personal folders to shared departmental locations. This includes all IU locations, both electronic (email, departmental file server, OnCourse sites, etc.) and paper
- Ask departing employee to begin removing all personal files and belongings from all IU locations, both electronic and paper
On the employee’s last day:
- Conduct an exit interview with the departing employee
- Ensure departing employee has moved all critical office documents from his or her personal folders to shared departmental locations. This includes all IU locations, both electronic (email, departmental file server, etc.) and paper
- Ensure departing employee has removed all personal files and belongings from all IU locations, both electronic and paper
- Determine and implement email transition plan:
- Departing employee manually forwards work emails to the department until the account is disabled (seven days after termination date), or
- Set the auto forward to send all of the departing employee’s emails to the department until the account is disabled. NOTE: If the departing employee expects to work in another department at IU or become an IU student, this option is not appropriate, because the email account will begin to be used for the departing employee’s new role
- Determine and implement telephone transition plan:
- Change greeting message
- Forward telephone calls to another employee in the department
- Cancel departing employee’s long distance authorization number.
- Request disabling of all non-centrally maintained accounts. This could include departmental servers and services, special research services, external services, and some institutional data systems such as HRMS and SIS.
- Collect university-issued items, if they were issued to departing employee:
- Employee ID card
- Building entry card
- University credit card
- Long distance telephone card
- SafeWord card
- Building, door and desk keys
- Computer equipment on loan to use remotely or at home
- Cellular phone
- Pager
- Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)
- Locker
- Ensure the departing employee’s final timecard is completed
- Collect departing employee’s forwarding address and contact information in case you need to contact them.
- Remind departing employee to return parking permit to appropriate campus office (Parking Services at IUPUI, Parking Operations at IUB)
- Inform departing employee that accounts are disabled seven days after separation from the university, so access to self-service information may be denied. Employee may have to contact FMS (812-855-0375) for printout of final pay deposit records. Additionally, health and dental benefits are discontinued immediately following separation from the university. Remind departing employee to visit the Benefits Office, if needed.
After the employee’s last day:
- When the HRMS e-Doc processing the separation of the employee from IU is completed, on the date indicated as the separation date, the departing employee will receive a courtesy email message indicating that accounts will be disabled in seven (7) days. All centrally-maintained accounts and their contents are then deleted permanently 180 days later. Departmentally-maintained accounts may have different policies.
More Information
More information about the eligibility to use information technology resources at IU can be found on IU policy IT-03.
