Leaving Your Job? Here’s How to do it Without Burning the Bridge
Every media outlet has talked about the great resignation and covered the numbers and reasons why people are leaving their jobs.
Few have covered how one can leave their post with grace and not leave a sour taste in their employer's mouth. It’s true, it’s an employees market, and some may feel free to make their demands with a feeling of almost invincibility. Many organizations are short staffed, and some are desperate enough to rush a hire to have more bodies to share the workload.
Anyone running a business has likely grown a few extra gray hairs in the past two years adapting to a whole new landscape on all fronts of the business, hiring and retention is just one of the many fires to put out every day.
If you are an entrepreneur, you have been dealing with sporadic shut downs issued by the government, which leads to lowered productivity and likely a constrained revenue stream due to limited capacity. In addition to suffering a revenue drop, you’re also dealing with the desire to keep all of your employees fed, to provide security for their livelihoods. What happens when revenue is a bottle neck and expenses continue at the same fixed rate? You’re in red.
To add to this, many employees have chosen to leave their jobs during the pandemic in search of work life balance. While you don’t have to stay friends with your employer, you also shouldn’t try to make an enemy out of them.
Before you leave for your next great opportunity, make sure to take care of the team that took care of you while you worked at the company. Why not set them up for success after you leave by being prepared?
Here are a few learnings from my past employees that will hopefully help you, if you are an employee considering leaving your job, to do it with grace and maintain at least a neutral working relationship with your ex-employer.
If you’re quitting, give proper notice. Of course, you can quit without notice if there’s another great job waiting for you that wants you to start the following Monday, but will asking your new employer for an extra week to transition so you can do a proper handoff at your current company really cost you the new opportunity? Asking for this may even earn some additional respect from your new employer, because they know if you can treat your ex-employer like this, one day you will give them the same treatment. While you may not need their recommendation or reference letter to land a job nowadays, try to look a bit further ahead to imagine a day when reference letters would be worth something again. What would they say about you? What do you want them to say about you?
Plan the succession and/or transition process as best as you can. Is there someone else in the organization who can help out with your duties as the company searches for a replacement? This should be a collaboration between the employer and the employee, as succession isn’t top of mind for most employees, as their focus is more on completing their assigned roles and duties. If you are the employer in this scenario, you should start planning for succession when an employee starts their job, not when they quit their job; this is a lesson I learned the hard way in the first year of the pandemic. If you are the employee, consider the little things like setting up organized client folders in a shared drive to make it easy for a newcomer to pick up where you left off or set aside time prior to your departure to train your successor. Setting someone else for success shows your integrity and work ethic.
If you’ve given notice, ensure that you will still do your job until the very last day. I’ve been fortunate that most of my past employees have the work ethics to continue their responsibilities until their last day. I respect these individuals and wish them all the best with their future endeavours. I would still gladly vouch for them and their work ethics to their future employers. With work from home as the norm during the pandemic, transition periods may well take place remotely. If you’re unreachable during work hours, take twice as long to complete a regular task, etc. it becomes obvious to your teammates and your employer that you’ve put them on the back burner while you’re still on payroll — that’s bad form.
I’ve experienced this end of the spectrum, where the departing employee opted to work remotely during their notice period, refused to visit the office to train their successor, and neglected to prepare the necessary handoff materials in an organized manner. Have you had a similar experience? If you were in this position, how would you handle any future interactions with this person?
Unless you worked in a silo by yourself, your team relies on you to let them know where they need to fill the gaps after you leave. Setting aside some time to do the handoff as a team would be greatly appreciated.
Even when things do come to an end, you have the power to choose how you wrap it up. In my opinion, it doesn’t take that much effort to prepare for your departure with foresight and grace to set your team up for success after you leave. Why burn the bridge when there’s a better option?
