How to get laptops back from remote employees
Equipment returns often fall into a gap between HR and IT, leaving nobody with a clear view of what is still sitting with former employees months later. IT usually finds out late and has to manually figure out if the person has a box, create shipping labels, and continually follow up. These unrecovered devices end up eating software licenses because they must remain in the inventory system until they come online to receive a lock command.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Remote-locking the machine during offboarding
- 2Sending a return box with a shipping label
- 3Delegating communication and collection entirely to HR or legal departments
- 4Making direct managers responsible for collecting all belongings before the last day
- 5Handing the list of unreturned devices to HR or Legal to manage the physical recovery.
- 6Establishing a written retention policy to keep the pending lock in the management system for a set period (like one year), then deleting it.
- 7Relying on baseline security configurations like BitLocker encryption and domain trust expiration to secure the data automatically after 30 days of being offline.
- 8Flipping the asset record to 'lost or stolen' in the accounting system so finance can write it off, independent of the device management system.
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Were trying to clean up our offboarding process bc laptop returns in a gap between HR and IT.”source ↗
“IT often finds out late then someone has to contact the former employee, figure out whether they still have the original box, create a shipping label and keep following up until the laptop arrives.”source ↗
“We currently have several devices still assigned to people who left months ago.. Some are probably recoverable, but at this point no one has a clear view of what was returned and what is still sitting with a former employee.”source ↗
“At this point, I have hundreds of "dead" devices in inventory that are eating licenses, with no way to ever confirm that they received a lock command.”source ↗
“The issue is that you got to keep the device in your inventory or the command will never reach the user as ling as they remain offline until it is removed from the RMM.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 4Tracking down unmanaged SaaS accounts when an employee leaves
- 3Why do former employees still have active logins?
- 3Cleaners keep moving my things and I can't find them
- 3How do you stop losing things during a cross-country move?
- 2How to get personal belongings back from someone refusing to return them
- 5Someone took my bag at airport security or on a train