CAREER BUILDER - ON CRI
By Robert Parkinson
Dealing with employee resignation can be quite a nerve-wracking problem for HR professionals in general. In particular, when several employees in the core management team ask to quit during the same period, the employee turnover issue rubs salt into the companies’ wound, and it can risk throwing the companies mission and direction off-balance. Living examples in the past five years from Facebook, Amazon, Google, HP, Alibaba, HTC, and other companies have all proved the seriousness of senior level employees’ turnover. Then the discussion of employee retention becomes the focus in the human resources field. However, no matter how well companies perform at employee retention, zero turnovers cannot be guaranteed (nor are they in fact desired). Therefore, my view is that if you do end up losing key employees the key issue is actually how to deal with resigned employees in the right way so that these people speak well of your company and may even wish to re-join some day. So let us address the question which lies in every HR manager’s mind of whether to welcome those “quitters” to come back or not!
Before starting giving answers to the key question, I would like to explain about digging out the deep reason of employee resignation in the first place. Let me start my point with some superficial or fake reasons. If employees tell HR people that they want to quit because they do not like the company culture, organization structure or doing overtime work. The conversation should not end here. These reasons are too general. Like peeling an onion, HR professionals must continue asking specific questions or even questions with specific options to find out the trigger cause of their leaving. Exit interviews, for example are a formal and official part of the leaving process that are best done by 3rd parties, as you are far more likely to receive accurate feedback.
Instead of regarding this digging and exploration as a routine task during the resigning process, HR staff should be clear that finding the real problem of a company can help it to grow up very quickly. In addition, HR can assess the value of the resigned employee during the conversation. If an employee quits because of his own failure (as is often the case) then the company may not welcome him back again. However, what if an employee leaves because of the company’s current problems? Companies should always be mindful of feedback from all levels of employees. Anyway, the main topic of this article is the important question of what to do with former employees who seek to re-join:
Actually, my thoughts about this topic come from an interesting Chinese saying. Some Chinese believe that it is never too late to turn. They use this saying to describe young people who made mistakes in the past but look forward to thorough reforms now. If we put the saying in employees who found leaving the old company was a mistake and now they really want to come back to the company, should HR managers give them a second chance? Even though resigned employees’ loyalty and honesty are normally challenged, HR managers have nothing to lose by giving them a second chance to try. I have a few simple tips for HR professionals to judge whether to take returned employees or not.
First things first, regardless of the returned employee’s past relationship among colleagues, HR Managers need to make sure that there will be a formal interview process arranged. This is of great importance for employees of all levels. It’s key to find out what went wrong in the first place so that it does not happen again. Do not regard a chat at a coffee bar as an interview! If you wish them to take the re-join seriously, then you must take the interview process seriously in the first place. However, when the time is right, it can be a ‘win-win’ scenario to give these employees a second chance to join the company: they may well have changed, matured, or gained valuable experience the company can make use of. To find out how valuable they are depends on how HR Managers interview them and how probing the questions they ask are.
Challenging resigned employees’ loyalty is another necessary step. I know this is quite a sensitive topic to deal with, but if you consider a re-hire you need to be confident that the previous pattern of behavior will not prevail: Psychology and hindsight tell us that people tend to repeat their past behaviors over and over again, and this applies just as much at work as it does elsewhere. They quit a company once; the chance of leaving the company twice is possible. By judging their reactions and responses when they are challenged in loyalty issue, HR Managers can make better decisions.
Thirdly, I would strongly advise companies should understand the reason why resigned employees want to be re-hired. After seeing the big picture in the same industry, some employees naturally compare new companies to their old ones. Once they learn that staying in the new company does not make them feel comfortable compare to the old company, they tend to ask old employers to go back. So the question becomes are they back for cozy life or hard working?
Finally, companies should ask resigned employees’ expectations if they want to come back. I am not talking here about salary. What I mean is that what employees expect to do in the company. For instance, one of Google’s senior researchers left to Tencent in 2010, he worked as the vice president of the company. However, in 2 year times he decided to return Google. This time he was appointed as China Chief Engineer of Google. If resigned employees expect to take more challenges in the developing the company, then why shouldn’t we re-hire them?
Whenever an employee asks to see you and hands you their resignation letter do not be panic. It is very important to calm down and deal with it properly. Having a sit-down conversation with the employee and the line manager can be very helpful. There is no need to mock resigned employees’ reasons of leaving or show any impoliteness to them. HR managers should always respect employees and treat them fairly. In particular, HR managers ought to better keep in touch with employees at senior manager and director levels. Some day if they feel tired outside “home”, the chance of coming back to old HR mangers is very high.
I hope the old Chinese saying as well as my tips can be helpful for HR managers to pick out the real “fit” for their companies. As a final thought, if and when people quit, don’t take it personally: don’t necessarily over-question your department or your business, very often reasons for leaving have nothing to do with the company (spousal relocation etc.) and allowing paranoia to set in isn’t healthy either!