Morale in the GAL - de-provisioning users in Active Directory

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In the last few years many organizations have been through at least one round of layoffs, reduction in force or organizational restructuring. 

Going through that process is painful and challenging in a host of ways, including the effects on the morale of the remaining employees.   Organizations are running increasingly lean and in most cases the workload is growing heavier.  Nearly everyone is being asked to do more work with fewer resources.

The best practices in HR suggest that the way to get everyone back to work with maximum productivity is to communicate at each step of the way, to be clear about the path forward, and to move on.

But that moving on part can be hard when your employees are constantly being reminded of colleagues they no longer have.  How are they being reminded?  Here are a couple of places to look.

• Directories and the GAL (Global Address List) - If Joe Smith was laid off in the Portland office, is he still listed in Outlook?
• Email groups - When your employees left the organization did they also leave all the distribution groups that they were a part of?
• Project/security groups - If you have former employees that still are listed as members of these groups, not only are you reminding the remainder of the team that they are no longer there to help with the work, but you may be exposing yourself to some significant security or regulatory risks.

The way to solve this is to make sure that you are properly (and preferably automatically) provisioning and de-provisioning your employees.   This is usually a cooperative process between HR and IT making sure that the changes made in the HRIS are also promptly reflected in their systems, which is usually Active Directory.

Change is seldom easy, but constant reminders of the way things used to be can be a huge road block to employee morale and productivity that's easy to fix.