What your employer can do, and will
Microsoft's own pages for administrators on removing a former employee lay it out in steps: block the person from signing in, save the contents of their mailbox, wipe and block their phone or tablet, forward their email to someone else or turn it into a shared mailbox, give another employee access to their OneDrive and Outlook data, and, after a holding period, delete the account. Google's page for Workspace administrators is much the same: an administrator can transfer ownership of all of a user's Drive files to another person, including when deleting the user, and files left in the trash go with the account.
Read that again as the person whose account it is. Everything you wrote, kept or received in a work account can be read by the person who takes over your work, and much of it will be, because that's the point. Nothing in it is private from the company.
So keep the personal things out
The first consequence is for you, now. The photos of the kids on the work laptop, the tax return you emailed yourself at the office, the personal passwords saved in the work browser, the one address book with everyone in it: all of it will be opened by a colleague, then wiped. Move the personal things to a personal account, a personal drive or a personal password manager, and make it a habit. The sticky notes under the keyboard don't have to go back to IT, but they shouldn't be the only copy of anything either.
Then make sure the personal account has a plan of its own. Our pages on your online accounts and your computer cover that side.
And make the handover easy
The second consequence is for the people at work. They will be sad, and then they will be stuck: the client who only ever dealt with you, the spreadsheet only you understood, the renewal that lands next month. Your employer owns the account, but your colleagues don't know what's in your head.
You can't leave them your password; the company's policy almost certainly forbids it, and the administrator doesn't need it anyway. What you can leave is a note for the person who'll pick up your work: where the current projects stand, which files matter, who the key contacts are, and what's due. Many people keep a short version of this for vacations. Keep it current, and tell your manager it exists.
What to write down now
- Who your manager is, and the HR contact, so your family knows whom to call
- Which devices belong to the company and should go back: the laptop, the phone, the badge, the keys
- A plain list of what's personal in a work account, if anything is still there, so nobody has to guess
- Where your handover note for colleagues lives
If you run your own business, the accounts are yours and the problem is different; our page on your business covers that.
