Streamline IT Employee Offboarding and Asset Retrieval

Learn how to simplify IT offboarding, recover lost assets, and enhance security—without the headaches.

What You’ll Learn

• How to automate IT offboarding and recover over 97% of company devices
• The true cost of lost equipment and how to prevent it
• Best practices for securing and redeploying IT assets
• Why leading companies are rethinking offboarding in 2025

Checkout the flow diagram here, copy it, and make it your own!

Key Takeaways:

Financial and security risks of poor offboarding

The Problem: Companies lose 30% of IT assets during offboarding, leading to unnecessary hardware purchases and security vulnerabilities from unreturned devices.

What You Can Do:

• Audit your offboarding process—how many devices are going unreturned?
• Assign clear ownership—make IT, HR, and Finance jointly responsible for retrieval.
• Use real-time tracking tools to monitor IT asset locations and retrieval statuses.

Automation reduces manual work for HR, IT and finance

The Problem: IT teams waste hundreds of hours annually manually tracking and retrieving devices, causing delays and inefficiencies.

What You Can Do:

• Integrate IT offboarding with HRIS and ITSM platforms (e.g., Workday, ServiceNow) for automatic offboarding triggers.
• Automate retrieval logistics with pre-paid return labels, home pickups, and retrieval kits.
• Set up automated reminders via email or Slack to ensure ex-employees return equipment.

Best practices when it comes to retrieval and redeployment

The Problem: Even when devices are returned, they often sit idle in storage instead of being redeployed, creating unnecessary delays and costs.

What You Can Do:

• Standardize return instructions so employees know exactly how to package and send devices back.
• Implement a “click-to-return” workflow—as soon as an employee is offboarded, retrieval should be in motion.
• Set up an inspection and redeployment process to get recovered devices back in circulation within 14 days or less.

If you want to read a bit more about offboarding, check out our article here, Offboard Employees Correctly–How to Secure Assets and Offboard Employees!

About Firstbase

Firstbase simplifies IT equipment management and provisioning for distributed teams, helping companies onboard, support, and retrieve devices seamlessly. We ensure employees get the tools they need—wherever they are—so they can focus on what they do best. Get in touch today!

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