Onboarding and Offboarding Staff Email Accounts: A Nepali HR Checklist

Two email mistakes show up repeatedly in growing Nepali businesses, and they sit at opposite ends of employment: a new hire starts without a working email account for their first few days, so they use a personal Gmail to talk to clients until IT catches up, and a former employee's account stays active for months after they've left, still able to log in, still receiving client replies nobody is reading. Both are avoidable with a checklist that takes a few minutes per person.

Onboarding Checklist: Before or on Day One

1. Create the mailbox before the start date, not after. Waiting until day one guarantees a gap where the new hire has no professional address to use.
2. Follow your established naming convention (firstname.lastname@, or whatever your business uses) rather than improvising a one-off format for this hire.
3. Set a temporary password and require a change on first login, so the account isn't sitting on a password HR knows indefinitely.
4. Add them to relevant department mailboxes (sales@, support@) if their role requires shared access, at the same time as personal account setup, not as an afterthought weeks later.
5. Send login details securely, not over an unsecured WhatsApp message to a personal number that stays on record indefinitely; a brief in-person handover or a secure onboarding document is safer.
6. Confirm they can actually send and receive before their first day, including checking spam folder delivery, so day one isn't spent troubleshooting instead of working.

Offboarding Checklist: The Day Someone Leaves

1. Change the password immediately on the employee's last working day, not days later, closing off access the moment it's no longer needed.
2. Decide what happens to incoming mail. For a client-facing role, set up forwarding to a colleague or manager for a defined transition period (commonly 30-90 days) so ongoing client conversations aren't dropped.
3. Set an auto-reply directing senders to the appropriate replacement contact during that transition period, rather than leaving the account silent.
4. Export or archive important mail if the account holds records the business needs to keep (client history, signed agreements sent by email) before eventually closing it.
5. Remove them from all shared/department mailboxes (sales@, support@) immediately, this is the step most often missed since it's easy to forget an account has multiple points of access, not just one login.
6. Close or repurpose the mailbox after the transition period ends, rather than leaving it open indefinitely at ongoing monthly cost with nobody actively using it.

Why This Matters Beyond Tidiness

A departed employee's still-active account is a genuine security exposure, particularly if they left on bad terms or the account had access to sensitive client or financial correspondence. It's also, more mundanely, a monthly cost for a mailbox nobody's using. Neither risk requires anything complicated to close, just a checklist item that happens reliably on someone's actual last day, not "eventually."

Making This Routine, Not Reactive

Build both checklists into your existing HR onboarding and exit paperwork so they happen automatically alongside everything else, rather than depending on someone remembering to loop in whoever manages email. WebsNP can set up new accounts or securely close departing staff accounts within the same day when notified, and our team will confirm forwarding and access changes directly so nothing falls through during a transition. Message us on WhatsApp when someone joins or leaves and we'll handle the email account side of it.