Navigating employee transitions is complex, and without the right business plan, these shifts can lead to a drop in productivity and morale. To manage change successfully, create a thoughtful transition plan that outlines task handovers.

Learn how to improve organizational shifts with our transition plan template and step-by-step guide.

What’s a Transition Plan?

Transition plans are documents that describe an employee’s role and provide detailed steps for handing over their duties. These roadmaps clarify responsibilities and help you maintain continuous operations.

You’d likely create these guides during any of the following scenarios: 

• Onboarding.
• Promotion.
• Retirement or another company departure.
• Transfer or relocation.
• Temporary leave or sabbatical.
• Succession planning.
• Project transitions.

Why Is a Transition Plan Important?

A detailed knowledge transfer plan ensures a smooth transition for both employees and employers by: 

• Increasing clarity: Mapping out the coming weeks maintains productivity and day-to-day task consistency. 
• Reducing knowledge loss: Transition plans outline the essential skills and expertise an employee brings to the team. These knowledge-sharing documents help you retain this employee’s know-how so it’s not lost.
• Ensuring continuity: Listing a worker’s duties can showcase that there are deadlines their departure affects. With this information, you’ll better understand where to reassign tasks and how to train other employees to avoid task errors and delays.
• Simplifying hiring: Understanding an employee’s responsibilities helps you craft an accurate job description to find the ideal replacement.
• Preparing successors: This document consolidates all the essential responsibilities and resources of a role, making it invaluable for incoming employees.

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5 Key Elements of an Effective Transition Plan

Transition plans describe a worker’s tasks, projects and responsibilities before their final days in their position. This information tells you how to transfer ownership of their duties and create an onboarding plan for their successor. 

Here are the main components of a strong transition plan.

1. Duties and Responsibilities

Outline how to complete the transitioning employee’s primary duties. Outlines should cover large tasks like preparing presentations and small things like taking notes for staff meetings.

To ensure departing employees capture all their responsibilities, have them work a full day while using Scribe. Our AI tool will generate step-by-step guides as employees complete tasks. These in-depth guides provide successors with actionable steps and annotated screenshots so they can jump right into their new role.

2. Outstanding Projects

Document the employee’s current projects and add a brief summary, timelines, suggested project owners and next steps. If possible, ask the transitioning worker to include relevant notes to help the project change hands.

3. Upcoming Deadlines

Consider any other deadlines the employee has beyond specific project due dates, like getting back to someone via email or sending a certain file over to another team. List these duties and their urgency so the role’s successor understands what to prioritize and when.

4. Key Contacts

Build a list of relevant contacts who help the departing employee execute their responsibilities. Include a short note that lists each contact’s expertise so the successor knows who to reach out to with questions and comments, allowing them to onboard quickly.

5. List of Resources

Outline the documents and software the successor needs access to, like Google Docs files, Scribes, project management programs and technical manuals. This list can also include resources that incoming employees need, like new computers or printers. Using this outline, new team members can easily find job-related information, and leaders will know what to gather before hiring.

How To Create a Transition Plan: 8 Tips

Here are eight tips to help you create a comprehensive knowledge transfer plan.

1. Create a Handover Document

Handover documents provide critical information at a glance to encourage better visibility. 

Essentially, handover documentation compiles the information outlined above — the transitioning employee's tasks, contacts, projects and deadlines — into a tidy document. We recommend using a handover document template, especially if you’ve never made one. Here are a bunch of templates you can start from!

2. Get a Process Documentation Tool

Process documentation tools help you seamlessly describe each transition step in detail. AI tools like Scribe can build informative guides in minutes that assist your onboarding process and help new hires ramp up quickly. Create visual transition plans with features like Scribe Pages, which combines multiple Scribes, Looms, YouTube videos and hyperlinks into one cohesive document.

3. Involve the Transitioning Employee

Collaborate with the departing employee to build a more effective plan. They know their job better than anyone, so getting their insight is invaluable when training a replacement. Encourage this team member to use Scribe to build detailed manuals in minutes, creating valuable company resources while respecting the person’s time.

4. Determine Who To Inform About the Transition

Consider who needs to know about the transition, including colleagues, leaders and clients. Ask the transitioning employee if they want to make a company-wide announcement, but if they’d rather keep their departure private, take a must-know approach. Only discuss the change with affected teammates to prepare them to take on additional responsibilities as needed.

5. Identify a Successor

To aid with succession planning, outline steps and resources for hiring a new employee. And collaborate with the transitioning employee when possible since they’re role experts. For instance, ask them for internal recommendations or characteristics to look for in a new hire, as they may point out skills or candidates you hadn’t thought of previously. 

6. Develop a Change Management Plan

A change management plan is a backup strategy for temporarily redistributing and delegating tasks. Since you may not have a successor ready to jump in immediately, it’s best to have a strategy in place to maintain your business as usual. Review the employee’s responsibilities and assign critical tasks to capable colleagues in case it takes a while to find a replacement.

7. Create Time for Analysis and Feedback

Set aside time for an exit interview to gather vital feedback. Ask about the transitioning worker’s experience, including what they loved about their job and what they would change. This feedback fuels your organization’s growth strategy and lets you make immediate changes to improve the successor’s experience.

8. Help the Employee Leave On a Positive Note

You’re ending your professional relationship with this employee, but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide support and resources. As part of your offboarding plan, include steps that celebrate the departing employee, such as leaving strong reviews on LinkedIn or throwing farewell parties. These positive interactions open the door for future collaboration and show remaining team members that your company values every worker.

Transition Plan Template

Transition plan templates logically organize crucial information and create a resource you can rely on during future transitions. Scribe’s Transition Plan Template makes this process easy with:

• Clear formatting: Headers and subheaders organize information so it’s easy to read and find.
• Personalization: Custom fields make it easy to personalize documents.
• Simple embedding: Videos, screenshots and additional guides make your plan an all-in-one resource.

Prepare for Change With Transition Plans

Employee departures come with several risks, including knowledge loss and project delays. But transition plans mitigate these issues by outlining tasks in advance. Using them minimizes the chance of process gaps and speeds up the hiring process. 

Recording everything an employee does may sound intimidating, but Scribe makes it easy. Quickly start a transition plan using our template and add automatically generated instructions to your guide. By creating tips and alerts, redacting sensitive information and uploading company branding, you can customize the plan to fit your needs.

‍Sign up for Scribe to record vital knowledge and help employees exit a role successfully.