What the Organisation Still Owes Them
Obligations running the other way after employment ends — documents, pension, data, benefits — and who answers when the person asks.
Obligations running the other way, in one organisation's own account
Handled by the provider, but the organisation is who the person asks.
Kept to the retention schedule, with rights attached throughout.
The organisation agreed not to depart from it, with no end date.
Required by a deadline that differs by jurisdiction.
An injury claim can arrive long after the last day.
Exercise windows run after departure, and nobody reminds the person.
Two of the six have no end date at all, and the other four end on dates nobody tells the person. This is one organisation's own account, not a statement of what any rule requires.
Name one person who answers former employees, and make sure they can actually get to the records. Most of what an organisation owes somebody after they leave is not money — it is documents, information and answers, arriving by email months later to a manager who has also gone.
The workflow in “What the Organisation Still Owes Them” becomes more reliable when work records, approvals and later corrections can be distinguished. For teams exploring getting teams to meet deadlines, explore the platform can provide practical context, while policy ownership, employee explanation and final decisions remain with accountable people.
This is the part of an exit nobody designs. It is also the part that generates the most lasting impression, because it is the only contact the person has with the organisation afterwards.
For an independent reference relevant to “What the Organisation Still Owes Them”, consult the KrebsOnSecurity analysis. Use it to test record quality, access, retention, fair process and exception handling against the organisation’s real departure workflow.
Documents with their own deadlines
Whatever has to be issued where you operate — a record of pay and deductions, a termination certificate, a form a new employer needs, a pension statement — usually has a timing requirement and sometimes a penalty attached.
Establish the list once, per jurisdiction, and put it on the standard checklist with a named owner. Reconstructing it for each departure is how something gets missed, and the thing that gets missed is usually the one nobody has needed before.
Pension, which is the slowest
Pension questions arrive years later: a transfer request, a query about contributions, a statement that does not match somebody's recollection.
The organisation is where the person starts even when the provider holds the answer, so the useful thing is to give them the provider's details and the scheme reference at the exit, in writing. That single line removes a surprising proportion of later correspondence and costs nothing.
Share and option entitlements
Where somebody holds options or awards, departure usually starts a clock — an exercise window, a lapse date, a condition about being a good leaver. Those terms are in a plan document the person has probably never read.
Telling them, specifically, what they hold and by when they have to do something about it is both the right thing and the thing that prevents a complaint about not having been told. It should be a line in the exit letter, not a document somebody is pointed towards.
Their own data
The person retains rights over the information the organisation holds about them, and those rights do not expire with the employment. They may ask for a copy, ask for a correction, or ask about retention.
That means the file has to remain findable and comprehensible after everybody involved has left, which is a filing question rather than a legal one. It also means notes written carelessly during the process are notes the person may eventually read.
Claims that arise later
An injury, an exposure, a benefit application — things that relate to the employment can surface long after it ends, and the organisation may need to respond with records, a statement or insurance details.
This is the strongest practical argument for retention schedules that are set deliberately rather than by default. Destroying a file on a tidy three-year rule and then being asked to evidence something from year two is a specific and avoidable failure, and what the right period is will be a question for somebody qualified in the place concerned.
The route back in
Every item above assumes the person can reach somebody. In practice they email a manager who has left, get a bounce, try a general address, and receive nothing.
Give them a named contact and a working address in the exit letter, and make sure that address is monitored by a role rather than a person. It is the cheapest single improvement available in this part of the process.
The address that stops working
Everything above assumes the organisation can reach the person, and the contact details on file are the ones that stop working first: a work email that was closed on the last day, a personal address from six years ago, a phone number that changed.
Ask for current personal contact details at the exit and say what they will be used for. It takes one line on the checklist, and it is the difference between a pension notification that arrives and one that bounces into a mailbox nobody monitors.
Why this is worth doing well
None of it is required by anybody's sense of fairness alone; most of it is required by something. But the reason to do it properly is narrower than that: former employees talk, they appear as candidates, as customers and as referrers, and the last interaction is the one they describe.
An organisation that handles the six months after a departure competently gets most of the benefit of having handled the departure itself well, even where the departure was difficult. It is a question worth asking once about the process, rather than repeatedly about individual emails nobody answered.