Today is my last day

When an employee leaves an organization it leads to cost of replacement & cost of training the replacement. Also the employee morale takes a beating, work gets held up and if the person who left was someone very close to you or simply sat next to you, then the vacant workstation gets you nostalgic about those fun/sad/bad moments you had with him or her.

But this is not about all that. This is simply about the mail that the person leaving sends to all his colleagues or sometimes to the entire company on his last day. I have had the privilege (?) of working for two companies in my career so far and in both places I have witnessed this ritual of sending these good-bye mails. In fact I sent one myself when I left the previous company I worked for.

This mail is to thank everybody for everything, to say how much they (the leaver) learnt being in the company, to say how they’ll miss some of the fun moments they had and finally to let the mail recipients know of their new contact number & personal email id with the line “you can reach me at…”

Some of them list names (10…15…. 20…. names) & also the ubiquitous “regret if I have missed out any names” and go on to thank even the top Management for “all their support & encouragement”. Some of them go on to say where they are headed, most stop short of doing that & say it more generally like, “its time to move on keeping in mind my future goals”

In my previous company, anybody leaving would send a mass mail to all the 500+ employees causing much embarrassment to the HR & the management especially because default we would get at least one such mail daily from somebody who we didn’t even know existed. Imagine the state of the individual reading the mail, what he must be thinking. One thought that most certainly crossed our mind: “Oh God this company has so much attrition…”. By the time I left the company, the mass mail facility was disabled. May be the attrition continued but we didn’t get a feel of that by the “today is my last day” mails.

From the point of view of the person leaving the company, it is his/her way of informing all who matter that that day will be his/her last day in the company. When you read the last line “wishing you the best…” thoughts like clouds begin to gather in your mind and until you are distracted with details like your target, you have already imagined the new salary & new designation of the person who left and think of how relieved he must be for not doing the same old boring work that you are still stuck with. The grass after all is always greener on the other side.