Every company manager has to deal with employee resignation eventually. The best and the brightest could have chosen to leave your side due to a better offer; difficult employees may have finally realized that this job is not for them. There are many extenuating circumstances that could lead to employee resignation. Most of the time, you don’t have control over them.
In handling employee resignation, it is better to be prepared than left paralyzed by the situation. Here are five tips in handling employee resignation to avert disaster in the office:
1. Read the signs – Every good human resource manager knows his workforce through and through. You should not only concern yourself with the benefit packages, or the workload, or the financial status of the company – you should also be always there to listen and observe. Usually, employees who are planning to resign show distress signals that only the trained eye could notice. For example, those in the cream of the crop tend to work longer hours and be more productive in the days before they hand over their resignation letter. They do this to prove that they are genuinely concerned with their work, and are only resigning for reasons such as better offers or family affairs. Difficult employees, meanwhile, are more revealing. Days before they resign, they slack off their work more often than before, and appear at the office later than ever.
2. Have a back-up plan – However you try, you can’t predict every resignation before it happens. As such, you should always have a back-up plan in store to mitigate emergency situations. For example, devise a plan that you can resort to when an employee resigns during peak season and leaves a lot of paperwork behind.
3. Talk to the employee – Once the employee formally files his resignation, try to talk to him and discuss the issues, but don’t try to win him over and make him change his mind. Usually, employees have already made up their minds days before they file their resignation, and you would just be wasting your time if you try to talk them out of it. Talk to them to understand deeper the cause of their resignation, and check if there are tasks that they will be leaving behind. It would be helpful if you ask the employee directly how he thinks his resignation could affect the operations of your company, so that you can correctly assess and mitigate its effects on the workflow.
4. Announce it to your other employees – The resignation of difficult employees may not have much impact on you per se, but at the level of your employees, it could translate to a brewing disaster. When an employee resigns, make sure that you will be able to announce it immediately to your other employees, so they can adjust faster. For well-loved employees, it is advisable to set up a simple send-out party, which could impart a message that the company recognizes the said employee’s contribution. This practice could even boost the morale of other employees, and turn the negative emotion connected with resignation into a positive experience.
5. Don’t wait for problem employees to resign – Meanwhile, if you have slackers who are starting to drag the overall performance of your team downhill, don’t hesitate to offer them the pink slip! Waiting for them to resign might be a more courteous way to handle the situation, but also keep in mind that business is business, and if one person, or two, were hindering your company’s advancement, you’d be better off without them.
Whoever is resigning, whether it’s difficult employees or top performers, the only thing you can do is prepare your team, so that works continues as smoothly as possible.
© 2013 Incedo Group, LLC
