‘Open Transition Programs’: A Unique Replacement for Two Weeks’ Notice

Imagine that you are in a happy long-term relationship where everything is going well. Now, imagine that your partner summarily informs you that in two weeks, they will move to a new city to live with a new partner. 

Would you think this was normal? Of course not. You’d probably be shocked and shaken. Your friends and family would be apoplectic. And your first question would be why your partner never gave you any indication that they were unhappy.

This behavior, unimaginable in a personal relationship, happens every single day in the professional world. As you read these words, someone somewhere is abruptly resigning from their company. But the inverse happens just as often: A manager tells an underperforming employee that they’re being let go, sometimes immediately. The employee is completely blindsided by the news and dismayed that they are out of a job. I had no idea they thought so poorly of me or my work, the employee thinks, panicking over how they’ll stay afloat.

Both scenarios tend to produce the same outcome: a strained farewell, lingering resentment, and a loss of trust on both sides. Who bears responsibility for this sad state of affairs?

Why Employees Aren’t Giving Advance Notice 

Employees may often neglect to initiate honest conversations, but in the vast majority of cases, the blame can’t be laid at their feet.

Instead, the culprit is often the organization or its managers. The No. 1 reason why employees fail to speak openly about a decision to leave is because their employer has failed to create a psychologically safe environment in which to do so. Rightly or wrongly, many people believe that if they approach their manager and say, “I don’t know whether this job is working out,” they will be sent packing, perhaps that very day. For many, especially those with families to feed, that’s a terrifying possibility.

Employees who don’t feel they can be honest may keep their true feelings to themselves, even to the point of lying outright, right up to the day they quit. It’s understandable. Behavior follows incentives, and in this case, the employee has an obvious incentive to keep quiet and hold on to their job until they have a new one.

Rethinking Employee Departures

What if we flipped the employee-manager dynamic on its head? What if we accepted that employee departures are a part of life in business today, and what if we resolved to bring trust, transparency, and openness to the process?

My company, a midsize marketing agency called Acceleration Partners, pioneered an approach to doing just that. After some discussion, development, and implementation—and a fair dose of trial and error—we developed what we called an open transition program (OTP).

Put simply, an OTP is a system for a company to create a safe and trustworthy environment for the management of inevitable personnel changes. An OTP identifies and tries to solve problems that cause employees to leave. If necessary, the OTP also provides a way for employees to exit companies in a respectful, mutually beneficial manner. The high-level principles of the program are as follows:

• An employee is encouraged to speak up to their manager if they are unhappy, dissatisfied, or interested in exploring other opportunities.

• The company commits to never immediately dismissing someone who admits they are considering leaving and instead attempts to address the root cause of their dissatisfaction. Take note that there may be legal implications to making promises about longevity.

• If the employee or company decides the best option is for the employee to move on, they set a departure timeline together and collaborate to plan for the employee’s replacement.

• The company agrees to support the employee’s departure through a paid transition period with career services and warm references. 
   

The 4 Core Elements for Implementing Open Transition Programs 

The elements of an OTP program are all hallmarks of good culture and represent more than the external transition component itself. Therefore, it’s very hard to build a program like this and expect managers and employees to get real about their problems or concerns if you don’t first have the right foundation.   

The four core elements are:

1. Psychological safety, or trust at scale. As an HR leader, you can build psychological safety by training managers to develop personal rapport with their direct reports, using one-on-one check-ins to touch base with team members personally, and regularly soliciting and applying feedback from their teams.

2. Open and honest communication. HR leaders can encourage open communication by setting the expectation that employees can safely vocalize their challenges and unhappiness with their managers. Critically, HR leaders must coach managers to respond to these conversations with openness and respect, rather than dismissiveness or defensiveness.

3. Mutual respect. The most important way to cultivate respect is to urge managers to critique behavior, not character. Even rephrasing an expression such as “You’ve been extremely lazy lately and it reflects on your work” to “This work isn’t up to your typical standard. Can we talk about what’s going on?” goes a long way toward showing employees that you see the person, not the problem.

4. Commitment to mutually beneficial outcomes. HR leaders can do this by not walking employees to the door if they express unhappiness. While “if you don’t want to be here, you might as well leave” is a common refrain, it is not one that will create a mutually beneficial end to the professional relationship.

Focusing on these cultural elements will not only lay the groundwork for an OTP, but it will also strengthen your company culture overall.

OTP in Action

To illustrate how the OTP works in practice, I’ll share a story about a former employee we’ll call David.

David was a long-term employee at Acceleration Partners. He was beloved by colleagues and clients and passionate about our industry. But as the years passed and the company grew, we could tell David’s engagement was declining.

David’s manager could have responded to this by criticizing David’s eroding performance. Instead, the manager asked David how he was feeling about his work and his role. We discovered that David’s role had changed into something he no longer enjoyed as the company grew, and he wanted to do something else.

At around the same time, a partner at a fantastic company reached out to us with a job description, asking if we knew anyone who would be a good fit. Our leadership team quickly recognized it as David’s dream job, so we decided to approach him to see if he was interested in applying. We made it clear that he could do so with our full support. We also, crucially, made it clear that if David failed to get the job, his role at our company was safe, and we’d figure out next steps.

David got the new job and still works at the company to this day. We’ve maintained a long-term relationship with David; we still keep in touch, catch up with him at industry events, and recently signed his company as a client.

This is an illustration of the power of the OTP. David got his dream job, we ensured a smooth transition during David’s exit, and our relationship with David is strong to this day.

The New Rules of Employment

To be clear, the goal of every company should be to retain good employees. However, it’s time to accept that the current employment environment is not one of lifetime employment and pensions. Rather, the current work environment is change-focused. People change, interests change, companies change, and people move on far more frequently. This is why employment is no longer for life—job hopping is more common than ever, and at this point, even two or three years at a company qualifies as a long tenure.

However, the process through which people leave jobs is a relic from a different era, when departures were much rarer. Employee departures should be a natural part of the professional life cycle, not a messy breakup that leads to long-term resentment. Companies need to lead the way in changing things.

I believe most people want to find a better way. This is where an OTP comes into play: Once you accept that employees leaving is an inevitability of modern business—no matter how great your culture is—you’ll want to make them as productive as possible.  HR leaders over the past decade have invested so much time and effort in hiring well and building healthy cultures, but the way employees depart is still broken and undermines that progress.

No one deserves to be blindsided by the end of an employee-employer relationship. An OTP is an effective method to replace the outdated way employees leave companies with a more respectful, human approach.  
 

Robert Glazer is the founder and board chair of Acceleration Partners. He is the No. 1 The Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of seven books, including Rethinking Two Weeks’ Notice: Changing the Way Employees Leave Companies for the Better (Sourcebooks, 2024), which you can preview on Substack. He is a top-rated keynote speaker and the host of the Elevate Podcast, a business leadership podcast.