Yes, it is best practice to announce employee departures to your team. Transparency helps maintain trust and prevents negative rumors from spreading. If you do not address departures openly, employees may create their own narratives, which can quickly become negative. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Transparency is crucial because it builds trust and prevents misinformation. When companies are open about departures, employees feel respected and are less likely to speculate or lose confidence in leadership. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
If you do not announce departures, employees may invent their own narratives, which tend to be negative and spread quickly—up to six times faster than good news, according to a Science survey. This can erode trust and morale. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Announce departures as soon as possible. Delaying gives time for rumors to spread and for employees to make assumptions. Prompt communication helps control the narrative and maintain trust. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Include the facts: who is leaving, why (if appropriate), whether they will be replaced, and what the plan is moving forward. Avoid sugarcoating and provide logical, clear information to prevent speculation. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Use your existing communication channels, such as townhalls, demo days, or email. Ensure the announcement is timely, factual, and allows employees to ask questions or seek clarification. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
At Spinach AI, weekly townhalls are used for sharing news, including departures, promptly with the team. Demo days (every two weeks) are used to celebrate accomplishments and say farewell, reinforcing a positive culture. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Keep the email timely and factual. Announce the departure, explain why (if appropriate), acknowledge contributions, share the plan for moving forward, and encourage employees to reach out with questions. Consistency in communication methods is important. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Yes, Spinach AI provides a template:
Encourage employees to ask questions in real-time during meetings or to reach out to their manager or leadership directly. Make sure communication is two-way to address any lingering concerns. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Be transparent about the departures, investigate the root cause, and communicate your plan for moving forward. Address the situation openly to prevent negative speculation and maintain team confidence. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Offboarding meetings are an opportunity to gather honest feedback from departing employees. Use this feedback to identify and address underlying issues before they affect more team members. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Effective channels include townhalls, demo days, and email. Choose the method that fits your company culture and ensures employees can ask questions and receive clarifications. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Maintain trust by being transparent, communicating promptly, and sharing your plan for moving forward. Recognize contributions and keep lines of communication open. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Best practices include: announce promptly, present facts, avoid sugarcoating, share a plan for the future, and encourage open dialogue. Consistency in communication methods is also important. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Spinach AI helps managers run meetings by automating agendas, taking accurate notes, and automating tasks. This allows managers to focus on communication and team alignment, especially during periods of organizational change. (Source: Spinach AI Website)
Spinach AI provides a library of meeting agenda templates, tools for automating meeting notes, and integrations with popular collaboration platforms to help teams run effective meetings. (Source: Spinach AI Website)
Use the same communication method for all departures (e.g., email or meeting) and follow a consistent structure for announcements. This helps avoid confusion and ensures fairness. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Poor communication can lead to decreased confidence, trust, and morale among remaining employees. It may also result in negative rumors and increased turnover. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Equip managers with the right tools, such as regular one-on-ones, skip-level meetings, and offboarding interviews, to identify and address issues early. Support and training can help managers create a safe environment for their teams. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Investigate the reasons behind departures through feedback and offboarding meetings. Address management or organizational issues proactively to prevent further turnover. (Source: Spinach AI Blog)
Spinach AI is an advanced platform that leverages artificial intelligence to enhance team collaboration and productivity. It automates meeting notes, action items, workflow tasks, and provides AI-powered insights for better decision-making. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Key features include automated note-taking, workflow optimization, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations with tools like Zoom, Slack, Jira, and Salesforce, and tailored solutions for different roles such as product managers, sales, and engineering teams. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Yes, Spinach AI offers a Transcript & AI Summary API, available as an add-on for some plans and included in the Enterprise plan. It enables advanced transcript and summary generation. (Source: Spinach AI Pricing)
Spinach AI integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and other popular collaboration and project management tools. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Spinach AI automates tasks such as generating sprint plans, PRDs, managing tickets, and updating CRMs, reducing administrative burden and improving team efficiency. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Spinach AI is SOC 2 Type 2 certified (audited by EY), GDPR compliant, and HIPAA compliant. It uses TLS and AES-256 encryption, and offers SAML SSO, SCIM, admin controls, and custom data retention policies. (Source: Spinach AI Security)
Spinach AI can be set up almost instantly by signing up with Google or Microsoft accounts and connecting your calendar. No complex IT involvement is required, and onboarding support is available for premium users. (Source: Spinach AI Pricing)
Spinach AI supports product managers, engineering teams, project managers, marketing, HR, recruiting, customer success, sales, finance, and accounting teams—essentially any team focused on productivity and collaboration. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Industries represented in Spinach AI's case studies include sales, customer success, technology, revenue operations, consulting, and healthcare technology. (Source: Spinach AI Testimonials)
Spinach AI offers tailored solutions: sales teams get CRM integrations and buyer insights; product managers get automated roadmap meetings and PRD generation; customer success teams automate onboarding and follow-ups; engineering teams automate sprint planning and standups; HR teams streamline hiring and onboarding. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Customers consistently highlight Spinach AI's ease of use. For example, Dan Robidoux (Careviso) calls it "natural and easy to use," and Belén Medina (Do It Consulting Group) says, "Spinach is the best thing that’s happened to our team." (Source: Spinach AI Testimonials)
Ron Meyer (Infinite Ranges) uses Spinach AI to manage sales cycles without pausing for notes. Sergio (AlfaDocs) automates meeting recaps and follow-ups. Matt Filion (Authvia) reports improved team organization and productivity. (Source: Spinach AI Testimonials)
Spinach AI stands out for its tailored features for different roles, advanced AI-powered insights, seamless integrations, and customizable solutions. Customers like Jason Oliver (Product Director) highlight its unmatched specificity for product management. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Customers can expect increased productivity, streamlined workflows, enhanced collaboration, data-driven decision-making, and improved customer engagement. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Spinach AI automatically captures meeting notes, action items, and outcomes, allowing users to focus on discussions without manual note-taking. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Spinach AI analyzes user feedback to uncover trends, pain points, and opportunities, enabling teams to make informed, data-driven decisions. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Spinach AI integrates with popular tools and automates updates, ensuring smooth communication and alignment across distributed or remote teams. (Source: Spinach AI Homepage)
Spinach.ai is enterprise-ready, offering robust security and compliance with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications. The Enterprise plan provides advanced features essential for large organizations, including SAML SSO, custom data retention, a dedicated API, compliance monitoring, and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
How do you announce employee departures? It can be a sensitive topic to navigate. In this article, Brennan goes through best practices for how to communicate resignations to your company.
Brennan
When people leave your organization for new opportunities, it doesn’t need to sound off the alarms. It’s normal for your employees to grow and move on to new opportunities.
But when more than one person leaves a company at once, a lot of leaders freeze up, understanding that this can look bad for the employees who remain. Are you now part of the feared “great resignation”?
Really though how you approach these departures will ultimately have a greater impact than the departures themselves.
We recently wrote about how employees can resign without burning bridges. But equally as important is how companies announce those resignations. Why? Your current team sees how you treat people on the way out. If as soon as someone quits you start treating them poorly, they’re going to lose trust in you. And that’s when things can really start going downhill.
I’m proud that we’re on good terms with many of our former employees (some are even customers!). In fact, it’s not uncommon for team members to let me know they’re looking for a new job when they’re ready to move on, before they’ve even signed somewhere else. Not to look for a promotion or a raise, but for the sake of transparency. That’s a level of trust my co-founder, Graham, and I continue to work for on our team.
Recognizing that this is a bit of an anomaly, I’m going to walk you through how we announce employee departures at Spinach AI to help maintain trust and confidence amongst employees.
First thing’s first:
The short answer is yes.
Transparency is always a best practice and this is especially true when more than one person is leaving your company.
Regardless of whether you announce the departures or not, employee resignation news will make its way around the office. If you don’t explicitly explain what’s happening, people will invent their own narrative. And you better believe it’s going to skew negative.
You know what happens when a negative narrative is created? It spreads. Fast. In fact, it spreads 6 times faster than good news according to a survey by Science.
I know that the concern with announcing a larger departure is a snowball effect. But, people will make their own assumptions regardless. It’s better to take ownership over the narrative.
Let’s dive further into:
Now we know you should announce departures, but the question is how? It can be a tricky and sensitive topic to navigate. Here are some tips to help:
If one person quits, there’s not necessarily a problem. But if it’s happening consistently, it may require some investigation. Why are people leaving? Is there a certain area of the business that’s seeing more turnover?
The old saying goes: “people don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers.”
The answer to why people are quitting is almost always bad management. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the manager themself is bad — always assume positive intent. They’re probably exhausted and don’t have the proper tools to create a safe environment for their team. How can you better support and equip your managers?
If you’re doing consistent one-on-ones and skip-level meetings, you’ll already have a sense of what’s going wrong before people start leaving — which is the best time to address the situation. If you’re not already aware of the issues, an offboarding meeting is also an opportunity to find out what’s been going on and get some honest feedback so you can course-correct.
What are your company’s pre-existing communication pillars? Resignations aside, how do you share news with your employees?
At Spinach AI we rely heavily on two recurring touchpoints with our whole team: a weekly 15-minute townhall and a bi-weekly demo day. These are also opportunities to share company news like resignations.
Our townhall is mostly for information sharing. In addition to reviewing our goals and metrics, it’s when we communicate any news and changes with the team.
If people are resigning from the company, we share that with the team at Townhall.
Since this meeting happens weekly, it gives us the opportunity to share almost immediately, rather than waiting two weeks until demo day.
Demo day is when we review what’s been done over the last sprint (2 weeks). It’s also where we’d celebrate accomplishments and milestones. When someone leaves the company, we take some time during demo day to share kind words about the team member and bid them farewell. Not only is this nice for the employee that’s leaving, but it also demonstrates to the rest of your team that there aren’t any hard feelings.
Demo day’s also a great opportunity to announce if new people have been hired.
While I do recommend these touchpoints, I appreciate not everyone has them. Use what you do have. Maybe email is the common mode of communication. That’s okay. But, whatever it is, make sure you give your employees the space and opportunity to ask questions in real-time and get any clarifications they need. Make it a conversation.
Once you know people are resigning, don’t sit on it. Like I said, bad news travels fast. The longer you wait to announce, the more time there is for people to make their own assumptions. Get ahead of it by ripping off the band-aid.
People see right through sugar coating — list the facts. Eg: These people are leaving, are they being replaced? If you’re not replacing them, why not? If you’re changing the role, why?
People crave solid, logical information. Don’t make them fill in the blanks!
While you don’t need to sugar coat an exodus, it is important to share how you’ll operate moving forward. It’s a time of uncertainty and people want to know that you have a plan for the future.
This will also allow you to put a positive spin on things. For example, if 2 people are leaving the company, that could also mean that there are 2 open roles, or an opportunity to promote from within.
If you’re not sure yet, let your team know that you’ll be presenting a plan of action in the coming weeks. You don’t need to know everything when you announce, but make sure your team knows that you’re thinking about it and will keep them in the loop.
While we at Spinach AI mostly rely on synchronous communication for these announcements, I appreciate that a lot of companies turn to email.
When using email to announce employee departures, the same principles still apply. That is: send the email as soon as possible, list the facts, and share the plan for the future.
The one major difference between announcing in person and announcing in email is that you don’t have the opportunity to respond to questions or concerns in real-time. That’s why it’s absolutely vital in email communication that you encourage team members to talk to their managers in their one-on-ones or reach out to you directly with any questions. Ensure there aren’t any lingering concerns.
Another thing I’ll say: keep your communication methods consistent. If you’re announcing a departure in an email for one person, do the same for everyone.
While every email should be tailored to the specific employee/s that are leaving, you can use this basic format for the structure of your email:
[Paragraph 1]: Get straight to the point: announce the departure, and explain in one sentence why they’re leaving.
[Paragraph 2]: Talk about some of the contributions the employee has made to the company and share some kind words and well wishes.
[Paragraph 3]: Share the plan moving forward.
[Paragraph 4]: Let your team know that their manager is there for them to discuss further in their 1:1s or that they can reach out with any questions or concerns.
Here’s an employee departure announcement template to help get started:
Don’t be afraid of announcing employee resignations. Sweeping news of departures under the rug will result in decreasing confidence and trust from your team. The best policy is to be upfront and address issues head-on — that way employees aren’t left trying to read in between the lines you left blank.
Now that you've read this article, here are some things you should do:
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