News – Garden leave: the employer

A recent study looks at how employers should respond to employee resignations and how to decide whether or not to grant garden leave.

It is always the same when someone resigns. They walk into the room, smiling sheepishly and close the door behind them. The next few minutes are key. The manager dealing with the resignation needs to be armed with 10 important questions:

• Where are you going next?
• Why are you resigning?
• Have you already signed a contract with your new employer?
• When have you agreed to start?
• Who else inside and outside the organisation knows about your plans to leave?
• Is anyone else planning to leave?
• What handover will be required?
• Who do you recommend should step into your shoes?
• Have you got in your possession confidential information belonging to the organisation and, if so, where is it stored?
• Are you intending to abide by your confidentiality and post-termination restrictions?

If these questions are not asked, the manager is blind-sided and loses a valuable opportunity to probe the employee. It is far less effective to leave these questions to an exit interview, which is usually very perfunctory.

Departing employees are often overly optimistic about being “let off their notice periods” and many believe that post-termination restrictions are “not worth the paper they are written on”.

This frequently leads to employees signing a contract with their new employer that has them starting before their notice with their old employer has expired. But the reality is that existing obligations with their current employer can be enforced.

Many employees have also come to believe that garden leave – paid time away from work during notice – is a given right, however, it is for the employer to decide whether or not to exercise its right to put the employee on garden leave.

It is for the employer to decide whether to exercise its right to put the employee on garden leave”

Garden leave is an expensive option and managers can feel as if they are rewarding the exiting employee. Wise managers will now consider whether or not it is the best option. We are seeing more and more employers who have been refusing to put employees on garden leave and have been requiring employees to work their notice.

By eliciting answers to the 10 questions set out above, smart managers can decide the best route to take when faced with a departing employee.

To discuss this article further please contact Dale Perrett dale.perrett@novoexec.com