Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
Ever realized you haven’t seen a particular co-worker in weeks, asked around, and discovered that they left the company a month ago but no one bothered to tell anyone? If you’ve worked for reasonably functional companies, hopefully the answer is no. But, whether through incompetence or design, a startling number of employers don’t announce it when employees depart, leaving their colleagues to piece it together themselves after their emails go unanswered for weeks.
If this sounds ridiculous to you, you are correct. It’s incredibly inefficient! People shouldn’t need to wonder: Is Jane on leave? When will she be back? Will she be back? Who do I go to with questions about X? What about the project she was working on for me?
For people employed at companies like these, the practice strikes them as strangely as it’s probably landing with you now. Here are some firsthand accounts from colleagues of the disappeared:
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“My old company used to do this. They would fire people suddenly—and then just never tell anyone that that person was gone. You would eventually just go looking for someone because they never responded to their emails, and when you found their desk empty, someone would whisper to you that they were gone. There was never any announcement about it at all, nor was there any information on who would handle their tasks going forward. A TON of stuff fell through the cracks because no one took up the duties of people when they left or were fired.”
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“I worked for a company that would inform only the immediate team (the ones who worked every day with the person and would immediately notice). For everyone else, it would be as if the ex-employee just disappeared. Sometimes you’d find out from the rumor mill; other times you’d just get a bounced email and find out someone had been gone for months.”
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“More than once, I showed up for a regularly scheduled meeting with a contact, and someone else was already sitting at their desk! It was a widely known fact that the IT organization created a ticket each time someone left the company, so many co-workers checked those tickets regularly to keep tabs on who was leaving. That company had a lot of turnover, and we all felt as if they were trying to hide it—but if that was the goal, they were not successful.”
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“I’ve worked at companies where I wouldn’t even get a bounced email! I’d send emails and they would disappear and I’d get no response at all. In the end, I’d try contacting someone else on the team, which was really difficult because there were no lists of who was on what team. Finally, I’d find out that the person had been laid off or resigned—and no one had informed any of the people on projects they were involved with or even closed the email account, so emails were still being accepted but not actually going anywhere!”
Needless to say, this results in a lot of wasted energy, with people sending email after email that will never be read, waiting on responses that will never come, and scrambling to figure out who’s covering what work. To wit:
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“I don’t know why companies are so fond of handling layoffs as if they’re midnight raids by the secret police, but it’s weirdly common. And every single time, it causes problems. I once saw someone who was given no notice at all. They just walked her out one day and didn’t tell anyone. Turned out she was the only person handling documentation for a major project in a satellite location. Because she never had a chance to talk to anybody, the other writers didn’t know they needed to take over, and the people in the satellite office didn’t know she’d gone. There was an awful lot of panic a month later on ship date.”
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“We had two very deep rounds of layoffs during the pandemic (travel industry), and the only way we could find out is if I sent them an email and it bounced back, with the word Leaver on the return email address. I have sometimes wasted HOURS trying to track down something I needed because I had no idea who was even left in the department.”
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“I worked for a place that did this as well, and it was absurd. What did they think? That if they refused to tell us who got laid off, we wouldn’t notice if that person never came in or was never online again?! I don’t know if these businesses think that maybe people will just quietly go about their work and ignore the layoffs if the higher-ups refuse to talk about it, but whenever we had them, people would spend a good half of the day or more going around, talking to everyone they knew, trying to find out who had been laid off. It inevitably led to a lot of time spent in speculation and not working, whereas if we had just been given a list, we would have chatted about it briefly and moved on!”
In some cases, employers even go out of their way to make it look as if the departed employees are still working at their jobs, long after they’re actually gone:
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“After an employee leaves, my company continues to use that employee’s email address to contact clients as if that employee were still working there. When a client calls, they just tell them that the employee is out of the office. This continues for months at a time, because they don’t want our clients to know how much turnover we have. I’m concerned that after I’m gone, the reputation and rapport that I’ve worked to build with my clients will be completely destroyed by whoever is pretending to be me.”
This is, obviously, bizarre. Clients are aware that people leave jobs and that companies have turnover. Of course, if a company’s turnover is particularly high, there’s good reason to worry that clients will be concerned about having a different account manager every other month … but the solution to that is to figure out how to retain more employees, not to engage in elaborate deceptions to hide it.
So what drives employers to hide departures, even internally? In many cases it’s a poorly thought-out attempt to control the message: They don’t want to look unstable, they don’t want people to think their finances are precarious, or they want to minimize drama. Of course, this approach ends up maximizing drama, as rumors swirl and people speculate on what happened. It also creates a culture in which people don’t trust their leadership to give them relevant (and very routine and normal) information. This seems especially relevant at this particular moment, when so many are losing their jobs or fearful about losing their jobs due to the new administration’s mass firings of the federal workforce.
More than anything, hushed-up departures are nearly always a hallmark of management that’s fully disconnected from workers’ day-to-day realities. The idea that employees wouldn’t need to know about the departure of colleagues they rely on is so divorced from how work works that anyone at a company operating this way should seriously question the competence of its leadership. They might not be receiving departure announcements, but that’s one message that is getting delivered, loud and clear.
