Staying Resilient in the Wake of an Irish Goodbye
Written by Geoff Kreller, CRCM, CERP
Of all the risks running through our minds on a regular basis, one never ceases to surprise us when it materializes. The business version of an “Irish goodbye” - your employee, late on Friday afternoon, abruptly informs you they’re leaving the company and starting a new position elsewhere on Monday morning. Or worse, they just stopped coming to the office and let you know when you contacted them. They didn’t talk to anyone about their plans, and now a million questions come racing into your mind all at once, everything from “why are you leaving?” to “what were your key functions?” to “who can temporarily take this employee’s place?”
Most employees will offer you two weeks’ notice as a business courtesy; however, there is no obligation to do so in an employment-at-will setting[1]. Even when offered, there may be significant operational risk in allowing a lame-duck employee to keep access to sensitive business and customer data, or to continue workplace relationships with existing staff. Employers are not obligated to honor a two-week notice and can potentially terminate the employee immediately[2] upon receiving the employee’s resignation.
Because the time between receiving a resignation and the end of an employee’s employment may be brief, mitigating the risk of sudden employee attrition should begin well before an employee solemnly delivers a resignation letter to your office (or you receive that resignation through e-mail or text). While you may not be able to predict with certainty which employee might win the lottery, move to the next role in their career at a different firm, or simply want to start retirement early, there are several key strategies to maintaining business continuity and resiliency through these events.
1. Reach out to HR and IT/Engineering immediately.
Your Human Resource (HR) and Information Technology (IT)/Engineering groups should already be aware of your company’s position on employees who give notice. They should both have playbooks for these events and be prepared to deploy them at a moment’s notice.
In addition to preparing for an exit meeting (see section 2), HR should review whether there are any open or outstanding cases or claims involving the employee. This includes claims related to harassment, discrimination, or whistleblowing.
Your IT/Engineering team should be able to quickly prepare a list of systems, functions and folders to which the employee currently has access (see section 5). In addition, IT should review the employee’s recent file/information downloads and emails to ensure the employee has not taken, distributed externally, or destroyed anything proprietary to the company.
2. Have a standardized exit meeting.
Exit interviews should be standardized to obtain key information prior to the employee’s departure. Exit interviews can be emotionally challenging; however, it’s important for your company to understand why the employee has decided to leave. If you have challenges crafting open-ended prompts for this purpose, Indeed and BambooHR recently provided a template list of questions to ask during these sessions. Ultimately, the responses to your questions can reveal gaps and weaknesses in your organizational structure, including:
Management support
Job expectations compared to their actual role/responsibilities
Workload expectations
Change management
Company culture
Communication
Recognition
3. Make procedural documentation a priority for every role in the company.
Few people actually like writing procedures, which is why one of the biggest losses during an employee resignation is institutional knowledge – how things actually get done is critical to document. Process owners should be held accountable to create and update procedures or process flows for their respective functions. Dependencies on other employees, teams, and third party systems should be identified through these documents.
Procedural documentation includes maintaining and updating vendor and third party management connections. Having vendor contacts in a centralized, accessible place dramatically reduces the time and energy needed to restore those relationships after the person responsible for the day-to-day management of those third parties departs your company.
In addition to aiding in control documentation, testing, and issue resolution, well-documented process flows and procedures can cultivate business continuity and resiliency. Some employees may be reluctant to provide these details because the organization’s dependency gives them a sense of job security; however, that same dependency can often make it difficult (even impossible) to promote or transfer that employee into a new role.
Managers, through their regular check-ins and 1:1s with their teams, should:
Check the status of current deliverables and projects, and ensure document drafts are saved in shared, secured folders (i.e. SharePoint, Google Drive).
Note internal and external dependencies of the team’s processes
Ensure they have appropriate access to 3rd party sites and content required to execute on the team’s processes, including:
Secretary of State sites
U.S. Credit Bureaus
Information/Verification sites (such as LexisNexis or Dun & Bradstreet)
Complaint and Feedback sites (such as the BBB, CFPB, or TrustPilot)
ID Card Verification sites (such as Veriff)
Customer Management Systems and Databases (such as Salesforce)
Analytics Support Tools (such as Tableau or BigQuery)
4. Schedule regular career development conversations with every employee.
Many managers and businesses, especially in work-from-home and hybrid environments, are incredibly task-focused in their 1:1s with direct reports. Recognizing the value those regular 1:1s provide (see section 3), separate career development conversations should be scheduled to focus the purpose of these sessions. Consider going to the local café or somewhere nearby the office to ensure both you and the employee are fully engaged and in the right mindset to discuss career development. It’s okay to recognize your mindfulness requires you or your employee to reschedule this important conversation (just don’t make rescheduling a habit).
Quarterly development conversations are incredibly beneficial in identifying signs that an employee may be dissatisfied with their current role. The questions posed during these conversations should resonate with your team, be relevant to the employee, and[3]:
Encourage employees to think deeply about their current performance
Help identify ambitious and attainable career goals
Give them things to consider in pursuit of those goals
Create alignment between their goals and company objectives
Identify ways in which you can provide mentorship and leadership
Employees should never have to wonder what their year-end review will look like or how they can create additional value. Allocating time toward regular check-ins and development conversations aids in eliminating these anxieties and cultivates trust and more open communication with employees generally.
5. Monitor emails, check the employee’s desktop, and reassign shared folder ownership.
While the company should remove the employee’s access to email, shared folders and their physical access devices (laptops, ID badges, company cell phones), it should temporarily transfer ownership of those items until the business no longer requires the information contained in those sources.
Monitoring e-mail is incredibly valuable for identifying upstream or downstream dependencies with external parties. If the employee was responsible for sending (or receiving) information from a third party or affiliate, those companies will likely send a message when they aren’t received. Recently sent and received messages will help identify the status of various third party relationships for which the employee was responsible. Emails requesting password updates help to signal systems and site access that was invaluable to the employee’s routine or process.
Cell phones may contain valuable text messages and contacts that can be used to reconnect with third parties and reestablish relationship management.
It’s important to assign an employee to review the employee’s desktop documents and shared folders for valuable documents, information and data that should be saved. Many entities wipe desktops and individual Google folders without assigning someone with the appropriate knowledge to understand what should be saved.
6. Don’t go overboard on lean and flat organizational efficiency.
There are clear organizational benefits of going “flatter”[4] and “leaner”[5]. However, it’s important to note both of these concepts place additional stress on business continuity and resiliency when employees abruptly depart.
Going “flat” removes middle management layers that may be better positioned to conduct career development sessions, recognize signs that an employee isn’t content in their current role, and temporarily assume an employee’s key responsibilities until the position is backfilled. Those middle layers of the organization help support resiliency by covering vacations, unexpected absences, and managing changes in the company’s strategy or direction. Middle management positions also provide a tangible, realistic and internal career path to executive leadership.
“Lean” organizations work to maximize a company’s efficiency by minimizing waste and unnecessary resources. If done to excess, going lean creates weaknesses, gaps, and cracks in the business’s resiliency and continuity plan. If organizations find it difficult to cover key functions when employees go on vacation, they will find it even harder to recover from a key employee’s departure.
In both flat and lean organizations, it can be difficult to specifically identify who should take ownership of a departed employee’s processes (or their folders and files), especially when there’s no overlap in responsibilities or where the staff is already running at maximum efficiency.
7. Have your hiring materials and vendors ready to go.
While unexpected attrition often leads to internal opportunities and advancement, these departures usually require looking externally to fill a vacant position. Having existing relationships with temp agencies, job posting boards, workforce management firms, and recruitment services can accelerate the talent acquisition process for your organization.
It’s critical to have updated job descriptions prepared for positions throughout your enterprise. Those job descriptions should define key prerequisites, roles and responsibilities, and other key information regarding the role.
It’s also advisable to consider the importance and urgency of backfilling an open position; there may be an opportunity to wait for a qualified candidate that better fits with the company’s culture, values, and mission. There may also be broader strategic plans within the company for hiring and reorganization, and having a role temporarily vacant can create flexibility toward that end.
Summary
Companies do not often consider business continuity exercises that involve the sudden departure of a key employee, nor do they deploy controls to mitigate the potential risk of that occurrence. Businesses often build static organizational charts without considering what the organization (and each of those employees comprising those blocks) may look like one to two years in the future.
“Change is inevitable.” “If you aren’t improving, you’re falling behind.” Organizations embody and promote these premises in their change management communication but easily lose sight that employees may also seek change for a variety of reasons. People want something more or something different. They win the lottery or receive an offer they couldn’t refuse. They want a better work-life balance or the opportunity to reduce their commute. They were privately hurt because they weren’t offered a promotion or raise and weren’t given an understanding of how to get to that level internally. They met someone and are moving to Venezuela.
To that end, some resignations are inevitable. There are immense opportunities to prepare for and learn from these resignations when they happen and leverage that information to enhance your company’s value proposition to all employees, enabling them to grow and develop with (and hopefully within) your organization.
Follow NAQF and Geoff Kreller on LinkedIn for additional insights. For more information on how NAQF can help your organization with career development, business continuity, or resiliency, contact us at contact@naqf.org.
Article References
[1] https://legalclarity.org/do-you-legally-have-to-put-in-your-two-weeks/
[2] https://legalclarity.org/if-you-give-two-weeks-notice-and-are-asked-to-leave-do-they-have-to-pay-you/#google_vignette
[3] https://www.betterup.com/blog/career-development-questions
[4] https://www.organimi.com/what-is-a-flat-organizational-structure/
[5] https://leantransitionsolutions.com/Lean-Technology/key-characteristics-lean-organisation
