How Should You Respond When An Employee Resigns? | Leadership Training for Engineering Managers
The average person changes jobs every two to three years, which means if you're a manager, employee resignation is the nature of the beast,
but you need to handle these situations properly otherwise, it will create a domino effect on the rest of your team, and it could potentially lead to more fallout, which is why I'm gonna show you the five best ways to handle an employee resignation.
Stay tuned.
Hey everyone, and welcome to my YouTube channel. If you're new here. I'm Doug Howard. I'm a licensed engineer and I help engineering leaders increase your impact at every level of your organization by showing you how to leverage people skills as your biggest asset for advancing your team, your company, and your career.
I'm gonna teach you the five best ways to handle an employee resignation. But I don't wanna waste any of your time, so let's dive right in.
Treat the Resigner Great
When an employee resigns, the first thing you want to do is treat the resigner great. Treat them like they still work at the company. Don't make the mistake that most managers do, which is just kinda write them off and leave them alone for their, lame duck period where they're dead man walking.
If you act unprofessional to the resigner, not only does have put you at risk of getting in trouble with your company. But word travels fast, especially with an employee who recently resigned. The resigner is gonna be having a lot of casual chats about work now that they're a lame duck. They're gonna be explaining exactly how the resignation notice meeting went with you.
They're gonna be explaining a lot of other things that are going on on their way out. Cuz everyone else is gonna be asking them, Hey, what did they do about this? What did they do about this? Now if you did bad in the resignation, notice meeting. It's gonna look bad on you and it's gonna look bad on the company.
Keep that bridge open with them. Still maintain that respect and that positive relationship. Treat them like they're still an employee on staff with your company until the day they leave. Because who knows, they may not like their new job and they may want to come back to work for you.
Now, when your employee tells you about their notice, when they decide to resign, here's how you should react.
Don't take it personal. It's not a reflection on you or the company. If you want to be a great leader then you should truly want to leave each person that you manage in a better position than when you found them as well.
Try to find it in your heart to be really happy for this person. If this is a great opportunity for them, you should genuinely be happy and show that.
Show that to them and celebrate with them. Even if you don't think it's a great opportunity for them, you should still be supportive and respectful of their decision.
Transparent Communication to Team
The second thing you wanna do is you wanna provide your team with transparent communication. People appreciate transparency and they hate it when there is no transparency.
Back when I was an engineering manager, we had one of our top sales people left and this person was responsible for about 75% of our sales in the company. Needless to say, when he gave his two weeks notice, my team, as well as the entire company, was very worried about what that meant for our major accounts.
That was a major source of revenue for our hitting our yearly goals and whatnot. What did that mean? Everyone's wondering, but instead of letting them speculate, I held a team meeting with my department right away and I explained everything that I knew as well as everything that I didn't know, but I also explained what actions I was taking and that the company was taking to account for this.
Much to my surprise at the end of that meeting, I didn't really tell them much because I didn't know much. I wasn't in charge of the sales team, but I did tell them what I knew. I told 'em that I knew who was going to be taking over the account in their absence, and it was gonna be a collective effort. I let them know what upper management was doing to take care of the situation. And I let them know how they could pitch in to help the situation. I didn't really have answers to all the questions that they had, but I told them what I knew, and to them that was just as important as having solutions because they didn't wanna feel in the dark.
I literally had a few people come to me after the meeting and just say, thank you for giving me, all this transparency. I've never had a manager talk to me like this when there was a state like this in the company, when there was a situation like this in the company.
On the other hand, if I did the easy thing, which would've been hiding from this announcement and not making this announcement about the employee's resignation. The other people on my team we're gonna start making assumptions about the situation and they'd probably be assuming the worst.
Before you know it, this type of gossip takes on a life of its own where, it's hard to disarm that, it's hard to put everyone at bay when these things start taking a life of their own. So you want to get ahead of it, in the media, they call this controlling the story.
You want to control the story by just being transparent. Right up front with your team about what you know and what you don't know.
Now let's talk about how to make this announcement with your team. Before you have this meeting with your team, you wanna stay in closer than normal touch with the resigning employee.
First you wanna make sure they're comfortable with the message you're gonna give to the team. If they ask you to do anything in particular, like if they don't want you to mention something in specific, like where they're going to work next or something like that, make sure you maintain their confidentiality if that's what they prefer.
Also, when you meet with them, you want to get them to close all the open loops on any ongoing projects. So actually give them deadlines for all the things that you think they can realistically finish in their two weeks notice or whenever their last day is. Then for anything they can't finish, get them to give you detailed status reports of all the projects that they're currently involved with.
After you've gathered this information and have this meeting with the resigner, then call for a quick meeting with your team. Right away at the beginning notify everyone about the resignation and tell everyone when that employee's last day will be. Then quickly transition to telling everyone that you will appreciate their help during this transition. As you're walking through all this, be genuine. Explain the challenges that you need to be ready for and that the team needs to be ready for and what they're gonna be doing in each of their roles to help everyone get through this transition.
As a manager, your top priority is keeping your team productive, which means minimizing the disruption to workflow. So explain to the team how you've asked the resigner to close any open loops and explain how you've reviewed a status update on all their ongoing projects. Then assign other employees to pick up their work from the resigner by giving specific tasks, goals, and responsibilities in this interim transition period. This will help your team understand the context, not just the daily to-do list, but the actual context of the employee who is leaving. If they're not the permanent replacement, they'll be better equipped to provide the right training for the person who is the next replacement.
When you communicate this to your team, make sure you're using a forward thinking tone. Explain what needs to be done. Ask everyone to take action and pitching in, and maintain the team mindset. Whenever you're talking to them, make sure you're saying, we, we're going to get through this. We're working towards this, we're gonna do this. Don't say I or them, or they.
Elevate Another Employee
The third thing you wanna do is use this as an opportunity to elevate another employee. When you're thinking about how this shifts roles and responsibilities, maybe there's someone who can permanently step into this person's role.
Take a step back to think about is there another person who is ready to rise up and individually fill this person's role? Or is there a collective group of people that can step up and take on more responsibility to replace this person? Don't just assume you have to hire from outside.
Use this as an opportunity to reward and acknowledge your remaining top performers. Show them that there are opportunities to grow here, and this is one of the best things you can do to make lemonade from lemons when an employee resigns.
Learn Why They're Leaving
The fourth thing you want to do is you wanna learn why the resigner is leaving.
You wanna do this so that you can expose your blind spots. Do this by conducting an exit interview. Exit interviews are a great opportunity to garner valuable information about what your company is doing well, but more importantly, where your company and your team and you as a leader need to improve.
This is a rare chance where you actually get candid, honest employee feedback because they're leaving, so they're not gonna just kiss your butt and tell you what you want to hear. When somebody quits, you should treat this like a stress test that exposed the problem within your company. Use this to find out what that stressor is that broke the system in a sense.
Every exit interview I conducted helped me expose at least one blind spot that wasn't on my radar. You might find things like your company isn't as attractive with salary benefits or with growth opportunities, or as attractive with modern tools and technology and systems as opposed to your competitors. Or maybe your work environment and culture isn't as good as what other companies are offering.
Leverage Resigner's Feedback
These are blind spots when you're working in the same company for a while, and this actually leads me to my fifth and final point. You want to use employee feedback as leverage to get what you need from your boss, your company, or HR.
For example, I had a person leave me, they resigned and gave me their two weeks notice. And when they did, they told me that the new opportunity they were going to was paying $20,000 a year more, even though it was a step backwards as far as the position they currently had with our company. So they're getting paid $20,000 more to do less, to take a backwards role. That was a huge eye-opener for me. I used this to build a case with HR and we ended up conducting a compensation competitive analysis with our market. It led to everyone on my team receiving a raise between 5% and some got up to 30%.
Imagine how many more people I would've lost on my team if we didn't rectify this. So when you have this exit interview with the resigning employee, listen to their feedback. Don't get offended. Don't be argumentative. Don't be defensive. You're doing this to gain true perspective, and you can use that to either make changes and fixes or be clear with future hires so that you set expectations clear and don't give anyone any false pretenses.
For example, if the reason this person resigns is because they felt like this work environment was too stressful, maybe the work environment is stressful and that's just is what it is in this type of work.
But then you should make that clear on future interviews so that people know what they're getting into. Some people enjoy and prefer high intense, stressful work environments and other people don't. They want to be left alone. So as long as you're making these expectations clear, when you're hiring people, you won't make this mistake again.
Bonus Tip!
Now I said that was the fifth and final thing you can do when handling an employee's resignation. But there's actually one more thing you can do and that's try to convince that employee to stay. If you're really high on this employee and you like them a lot and you don't wanna let them go, then take a shot at convincing them to stay.
Back when I was an engineering manager, I had a direct report, give me their notice on a Friday afternoon around three o'clock, and they came back to my office the first thing Monday morning and tore up the offer letter that they received. We did this without getting HR involved, and I didn't even give this employee a raise either.
If you wanna learn how to do this, check out my episode called How to Convince a Top Performing Employee To Stay After Resigning.
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