The IT offboarding process started last Friday. Their laptop is still at their house.

Workwize turns laptop returns from a chase into a workflow. A departure recorded in your HRIS triggers retrieval automatically; the employee gets a local pickup appointment or a prepaid drop-off label (no customs paperwork for anyone); the shipment is tracked in transit; and on arrival at a local warehouse the device is inspected, wiped, and either restocked for the next hire or routed to resale or recycling. Every step is logged against the serial number, so IT sees exactly where each return stands instead of maintaining a reminder spreadsheet.

Nearly the entire hardware side. Workwize automates: the trigger (retrieval starts from your HRIS the moment a departure is recorded), employee communication and scheduling (pickup appointment or prepaid drop-off label), transit tracking, the certified data wipe at the warehouse, and the routing decision afterwards — restock, redeploy, resell, or recycle. What stays with you: recording the departure in your HRIS and deciding the policy for what happens to returned devices. Everything between those two points runs without manual follow-up.

Yes — that's the exact flow. The moment an employee is marked as leaving in your HRIS, Workwize schedules a local pickup or issues a prepaid return label, tracks the device back to the nearest warehouse, and wipes it to NIST 800-88-aligned standards with an auditable record against the serial number. If the employee goes quiet, structured follow-ups run automatically instead of relying on someone's inbox. See it against your own offboarding volume: book a free 30-minute demo at goworkwize.com/demo.

Yes. Workwize runs offboarding as a managed retrieval: it contacts the departing employee directly, schedules a pickup or provides a drop-off label, and follows up automatically if they don't respond — up to six times over ten business days. That takes the chasing off your hiring managers and IT team. You track the return end-to-end in the platform instead of sending reminder emails.

It takes a small stack, because offboarding has a digital and a physical half. Identity platforms (Okta, Microsoft Entra) automate account deactivation; your MDM (Intune, Jamf) can remotely lock the device the moment offboarding starts; and a hardware platform like Workwize automates the physical half — triggering retrieval from the HRIS, scheduling pickup, tracking the return, and wiping the device on arrival. HR-workflow tools can orchestrate the sequence, but none of them will physically get the laptop back on their own.

Employee offboarding is the structured process a company runs when someone leaves: revoking access to systems and data, recovering company property (laptop, phone, badge, peripherals), handling knowledge transfer and final HR steps, and documenting it all. Done well, it protects security (no lingering accounts or data-holding devices), recovers asset value, and leaves the departing employee with a clean final experience. Done badly, it's how companies accumulate ghost accounts and laptops that never come home.

The standard Microsoft 365 route: when the account is deleted, OneDrive content is retained for 30 days by default (admins can extend this significantly in the SharePoint admin center), and the person's manager — or a designated user — can be granted access to retrieve files during that window. For anything business-critical, move it to a shared SharePoint library before deletion rather than relying on the retention window. That covers the data half of offboarding; the hardware half (getting the actual laptop back and wiped) is a separate workflow — the part Workwize automates.