A Layoff Handover Board for Seongsu-dong Startups Could Work

What breaks before a layoff

When a company leader knows layoffs are necessary but delays the decision, it is not only the org chart that stays unchanged. New contracts and customer commitments keep accumulating before the company has decided which lines of business to stop. Later, there may not even be time to identify the work done by people who are leaving.

The problem on the day of a layoff is not limited to headcount. The company must also decide who will handle customer inquiries, who will own active contracts, and where documents and recurring meetings created by departing employees will move. If these three things are missed, remaining employees inherit their previous work as well as new work.

As of 2023, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the Korean government ministry responsible for small and medium-sized businesses, counted 8,298,915 small and medium-sized enterprises in Korea, or 99.9% of all businesses. They employed 19,117,649 people.

In systems that handle personal information, access rights must be changed or removed without delay when the responsible person changes because of resignation or another personnel change. Records of access being granted or changed must also be kept for at least three years. Keeping a departing employee’s account open until handover is complete should therefore be avoided.

The Korea Internet & Security Agency (한국인터넷진흥원), a public agency that provides information-security guidance, also lists locking or deleting former employees’ accounts, returning equipment and access cards, changing shared passwords, and confirming the results of those actions. The Personal Information Protection Commission (개인정보보호위원회), Korea’s privacy regulator, fined the Government Employees Pension Service KRW 532 million after 1,036 people’s information was viewed without authorization because access rights were not removed promptly following a job change.

What happens at an 18-person company in Seongsu-dong

Consider an 18-person company in Seongsu-dong, Seoul, selling reservation-management software to local stores. Its chief executive needs to reduce the team by two because revenue has fallen. One person works in sales across several customers. The other handles both customer inquiries and service operations.

While delaying the decision, the chief executive keeps assigning new customers to both people. Dates for promised feature changes sit in email. Complaints sit in messaging tools. Contract renewal dates sit in the customer-management ledger. Recurring meetings are in the responsible employee’s personal calendar, so no other employee can see the full picture at once.

After the decision, three separate lists appear. Management writes down work to retain. The HR person checks exit procedures. The service team redistributes customers. Account blocking is requested by message from an outside IT provider, so the company can only later work out who handled what and when.

A handover board aimed only at companies with 10 to 30 employees in Seongsu-dong should start differently. Its first question should not be “Who is leaving?” but “Which customers, work, and accounts does this person own?” Selecting a name would open one list of customers, active commitments, recurring work, and company accounts the person uses.

The chief executive assigns one new owner and a completion time to each item. Customers with a contract renewal within 90 days or an unresolved complaint move to red. An item cannot be marked complete until a new owner is assigned. A customer notice includes only the new owner, the date of the next commitment, and a contact point for inquiries.

Account cleanup happens alongside customer handover, but is verified by a different person. Email and the customer-management ledger transfer materials to the new owner. Access to messaging, shared documents, payment tools, and the customer inquiry inbox is cut at the time of departure. The screen records not “block requested,” but the actual blocking time and the person who confirmed it.

The day after a layoff, the tool shows remaining work again by person. If one employee receives 20 customers, weekly reporting, and incident response at once, the chief executive must choose what to stop before the task can be marked complete. This prevents the quiet decision to keep every task unchanged despite reducing headcount.

The tool does not decide who should be laid off or how they should be notified. People still need to judge which customers require a direct call, which business lines to close, and what remaining employees can handle. The tool’s role ends at exposing missing customers and accounts, and work with no owner.

Limiting the area to Seongsu-dong means the product does not need to cover HR systems for every industry from the start. It can meet five companies of a similar size, examine real departure lists and customer-reassignment practices, and begin with templates fitted to commonly used work tools. Its first customers may also be easier to find through introductions from nearby company builders than through nationwide advertising.

How handovers were reduced elsewhere

US meal-kit company Blue Apron used BetterCloud to handle departing employees’ accounts and data ownership across Google work tools, Microsoft work tools, Slack, Box, and other services. Blue Apron built more than 60 automated workflows for employee onboarding and offboarding.

In a case study published by BetterCloud, the time needed to process one person fell from about four hours to 10 minutes, and one employee could handle hundreds of cases. The results were published by the supplier and need independent verification, but they are a clear reference for handling access removal and data transfer on one screen.

Budii, a business unit at Japanese technology company Speee, used tl;dv when sales staff handed contract background to customer-support staff. It extracted customer goals, context, and decisions from recordings and summaries of sales calls, with the sales representative making a final check.

Before adoption, handing over one customer took about 30 minutes and involved repeated questions. The company said the transfer time fell to one-third of that level. This figure was also published by the service supplier and needs verification, but it shows a handover based on actual conversation records rather than a person’s memory.

When Airbnb reduced its workforce by about 1,900 of 7,500 employees, or about 25%, in 2020, it operated a public talent directory for departing employees and a dedicated job-support team. It also provided career-transition services for four months to affected people in 24 countries.

The company assigned a substantial number of recruiters to help departing employees connect with jobs and had remaining staff participate in those connections. It did not disclose a job-placement rate or the time taken to find new work, so the verifiable outcome goes only as far as showing that it operated a large-scale support process.

Four things worth building first in Seongsu-dong

1. A customer and work assignment board for layoff day

• What it does: Pulls in the departing employee’s customers, recurring work, and company accounts, then assigns a new owner and deadline.
• Who uses it: A chief executive at a 10-to-30-person Seongsu-dong software company that charges customers a monthly fee.
• Why now: A departing employee’s access must be removed quickly, but customer commitments and materials need to move into company-controlled spaces first.
• First screen: Under the departing employee’s name, show three lists: “No new owner,” “Customer not notified,” and “Account not blocked.”

2. A customer commitment recovery inbox

• What it does: Collects dated commitments and unresolved issues from email, meeting notes, and the customer-management ledger into one page per customer.
• Who uses it: A Seongsu-dong advertising or design agency where one sales representative manages several brand customers.
• Why now: In a sudden departure, the first thing to disappear is not a document but a small promise made in conversation.
• First screen: Show “Commitments due within 7 days” beside each customer name, with links to the underlying email or meeting notes.

3. A departing employee account-recovery checklist

• What it does: Collects each employee’s company work tools and records access-blocking times, data transfer, and equipment return in one place.
• Who uses it: Seongsu-dong online stores and consumer brands without a dedicated IT person.
• Why now: Access must be recovered promptly in systems containing personal information, but small companies often work with outside IT providers over messaging tools, making records easy to scatter.
• First screen: For each planned departure, show the number of accounts remaining and the planned blocking time, with only unverified items marked in red.

4. A Seongsu-dong network for connecting departing employees to their next role

• What it does: Connects a departing employee’s consented work history and desired role with open roles at local companies.
• Who uses it: Early-stage teams that cannot offer affected employees an expensive career-transition programme.
• Why now: Narrowing the scope to small companies in the same area can make it possible to introduce needed people before public recruitment and move quickly to in-person interviews.
• First screen: Show role, work completed, available start date, and consent scope before a person’s name.

Why this matters where you are

The immediate operational problem is not unique to one neighbourhood: a departure can leave customer commitments, recurring work, and company accounts without a clear owner. Check whether companies in your market use separate lists for HR, customer reassignment, and access removal, and whether they can verify completed account blocks. The privacy rules, common work tools, and local hiring networks will differ, but the handover workflow can be tested with a small group of similar companies.

What to check in 30 minutes today

With one leader at a Seongsu-dong company with 10 to 30 employees and a recent departure case, write every customer, recurring task, and work account owned by the person who left on paper. If three or more items cannot be assigned a new owner and a decision on whether to block access within 30 minutes, that is a sign that the first feature of a handover board is worth testing.