A 1,400-dollar laptop shipped to a new hire in Lisbon. They work there for 18 months, then resign. HR sends them an offboarding checklist. IT sends a polite email. Nothing comes back. This happens somewhere in your company right now, and it’s probably happening more often than you think.
Without a formal retrieval process, many companies never get a large share of departing employees’ laptops back. For fully remote teams, the gap is usually wider. The devices don’t disappear maliciously in most cases. They end up in a drawer, forgotten. The employee moved, doesn’t know who to send it to, or is waiting for someone to send them a box. Nobody follows up. The asset is written off.
Why recovery rates are so low
The default retrieval process at most companies is: send an email, hope for the best. This fails for predictable reasons. The email goes to the departing employee’s work account, which is suspended on their last day. No pre-paid return label is included, so they’d need to pay out of pocket to ship a heavy laptop internationally. There’s no clear deadline. No escalation path. No one person accountable for following it through.
For international employees, the friction compounds. Customs forms, packing materials, courier relationships: these are logistical problems that most IT teams haven’t solved in advance. The easier path for the employee is to do nothing, and that’s what usually happens.
"Take a 200-person company with 25% annual turnover: 50 people leave each year. If 2 in 5 laptops never come back, that’s 20 devices, or about $28,000 written off every year at $1,400 each. And that’s before the security risk."
The financial and security cost
Hardware cost is the obvious line item. A mid-range business laptop costs $1,200 to $1,800 fully configured. Even a moderate loss rate adds up fast: in the example above, 20 lost laptops cost around $28,000 a year, every year. For a 500-person company, scale accordingly.
The security cost is harder to quantify but more significant. An unrecovered device may contain cached credentials, locally stored files, VPN certificates, or access to browser sessions that weren’t properly terminated. Even with disk encryption, an unrecovered device is an unknown quantity. Your asset register shows it as unaccounted for. Your security team can’t confirm it’s been wiped. That’s an open compliance finding for any serious framework.
Building a retrieval process that actually works
- Initiate the retrieval request the day resignation is accepted, not on the last day
- Include a pre-paid return shipping label in every hardware offboarding communication
- Ship a padded return box to remote employees proactively if no on-site return is possible
- Set a clear return deadline in the employment agreement and reference it in offboarding
- Configure MDM to flag devices as "pending retrieval" and trigger remote wipe if not returned by deadline
- Use a logistics partner with international coverage and tracking, not standard post
- Offer a small incentive for prompt return if company culture supports it (gift card, donation in their name)
- Escalate to manager if device is not returned within 7 days of last working day
- For hardware not returned, trigger MDM remote wipe immediately and log it in the asset register
- Track return rates by region and manager: visibility alone improves compliance
How modern platforms handle this automatically
The manual version of device retrieval is a coordination problem: multiple systems, multiple people, multiple reminders. It fails because no single person owns the end-to-end process, and the friction is too high for the departing employee.
Platforms like Walter! automate the entire flow. When a departure is confirmed, the retrieval request is generated automatically, complete with pre-paid label and packaging instructions. The employee receives clear, friendly communication with a specific deadline and a simple return process. If the deadline passes without a return scan, the MDM wipes the device remotely. The asset record is updated either way.
Automated processes recover far more devices than email reminders. The difference isn’t magic. It’s that the friction is removed from the employee’s side, and accountability is built into the process rather than assumed.
