How to Recover Equipment From Remote Employees

The problem with remote returns

When everyone worked in an office, equipment recovery was simple: an employee left, dropped their laptop with IT, and walked out. With a distributed workforce, that hand-off no longer happens. Devices are scattered across home offices, different cities, and sometimes different countries. Studies consistently find that a meaningful share of company laptops are never returned after an employee departs, and each unreturned device represents both a hardware loss and a serious data-security risk.

The challenge is rarely bad intent. More often it is friction: the former employee does not have a box, does not know where to ship the device, or simply forgets once the relationship ends and there is no longer a paycheck creating leverage. The fix is to remove that friction with a clear, prepaid, well-tracked process that starts before the employee's last day.

A step-by-step recovery process

1. Trigger recovery at offboarding

Equipment recovery should be an automatic step in your offboarding workflow, not an afterthought. The moment HR initiates a departure — voluntary or involuntary — IT should receive a recovery task that lists every asset assigned to that person. If your asset inventory is accurate, you already know exactly what needs to come back. If it is not, this is the moment you will wish it were.

2. Communicate early and clearly

Reach out to the departing employee with a single, friendly message that sets expectations: which devices to return, how they will be returned, and the deadline. Make it effortless to comply. Vague instructions like "please send your laptop back" create delay; a concrete plan with a shipping label attached gets results.

3. Send a prepaid return kit

The single biggest lever is the prepaid return kit. Ship the employee a right-sized box with protective packaging, a prepaid shipping label, and clear instructions. When the employee does not have to find a box, pay for shipping, or figure out logistics, return rates climb dramatically. Pre-paid, pre-addressed kits convert "I'll get to it" into a five-minute task.

4. Track the shipment end to end

Once a kit is out, you need visibility. Track each device by serial number through the entire journey: kit dispatched, employee notified, in transit, received, inspected. A dashboard that shows the status of every outstanding device prevents items from quietly falling through the cracks and gives you an audit trail for finance and security.

5. Escalate on a schedule

Not everyone responds to the first email. Build a reminder cadence — for example, a nudge at day three, day seven, and day fourteen — that escalates politely. If a device is still outstanding after the final reminder, escalate to the former employee's manager and, where appropriate, reference the equipment-return clause in their employment or offboarding agreement.

6. Deactivate, then verify the wipe

Revoking access (SSO, email, VPN, SaaS accounts) should happen immediately on the last day regardless of device status, so an unreturned laptop cannot reach company data. Once a device is back, confirm a full remote or on-receipt wipe before the hardware is re-imaged, redeployed, or retired. Recovery is not finished until the data is gone.

Common pitfalls

• Stale asset records. If you do not know what was issued, you cannot know what is missing. Keep inventory current.
• Putting the burden on the employee. Asking departing staff to source packaging and pay for shipping kills return rates.
• No deadline or escalation. Open-ended requests drift forever. Set a date and follow up.
• Delaying access revocation. Waiting for the device to come back before cutting access leaves a security gap.
• No central tracking. Spreadsheets and email threads lose devices. Use one source of truth.

How a service like BoomerangDepot streamlines it

Running this process by hand for one or two departures a month is manageable. At scale, it becomes a part-time job for your IT team. BoomerangDepot automates the heavy lifting: prepaid return kits are generated and shipped from a request, every device is tracked by serial number on a single dashboard, reminder and escalation cadences run automatically, and returned hardware is received and inspected at a warehouse so your team never touches a box. The result is higher return rates, a clean audit trail, and IT time spent on real work instead of chasing laptops.