Should HR still expect two weeks notice from departing employees?
mikeerdas
7 Posts
It seems to "always" have been a tradition in HR, and an expectations from managers / supervisors, that departing employees give 2 weeks notice. Some want more than 2 weeks, but it seems tough to "fault" non-executive level departing staff for giving 2 weeks.
Although 2 weeks are expected, I have read about employees in other workplaces increasingly being "shown the door" very shortly after giving 2 weeks notice--primarily, it seems, for security and morale reasons. Is this a trend on the rise? And if so, are employees "fighting back"? e.g. can we expect them to give less than 2 weeks notice and then be sure not to grumble about it?
Given the "at-will" nature of many employees, should we in fact fault anyone for not giving the traditional 2 weeks of noice? What is customary these days, assuming customs are changing at all.
How does your organization handle this? Should having offered less than 2 weeks notice ever be mentioned while giving a reference for a former employee?
Thanks.
Mike
Comments
We do want our employees to give us at least 2 weeks notice. In fact we would like more if possible as some of our employees are scheduled on projects 4-8 weeks out. When I make an offer to a candidate and they tell me they can't start for at least 2 weeks, I tell them that I understand and respect that, as I would want the same courtesy shown to us. We have had a couple of employees leave with less than 2 weeks notice (both of them said that their new employer wanted them to start right away so that is why they didn't give 2 weeks).
We have, on occasion, over the years, not accepted the 2 weeks notice of some, typically in the sales field. Most are not going to continue selling during that time frame anyway. But usually we have someone work out the notice in order to make sure the transition to someone else is good.
From what I understand, most companies show their employees to the door earlier than two weeks if they are going to work for a competitor or if there might have been some bad feelings between the company and the employee or if there could be a possible security risk.
As far as any notice, I've always taken it to be that two weeks was not only tradition but also just common courtesy so that any unfinished work can be handed over easily but if the employee wants to leave sooner, we let them leave. A few months ago we had an employee up and quit. She was clearly unhappy here and even though I sat and spoke with her about her reasons leaving and tried to get her to stay longer, she was firm on leaving the day she gave us notice of her quitting. In fact, she didn't even finish out the day. Just recently we laid off one of our IT people. We only gave him three days notice of when his last day was going to be (not counting the weekend.) Yeah, he was very unhappy about the short notice and had I had more notice myself of the layoff, I would have tried to extend it out. But it was our executives' decision and they reasoned that we were giving him a month's severance pay so the short notice was ok.
What is your reasoning for wanting to mention how much notice the employee gave you when giving a reference? Either they left on bad terms or they didn't and either they were a good employee or they weren't. That's really all that should matter.