Yes, announcing an employee’s departure is considered best practice. Transparency helps maintain trust and confidence among remaining employees. If departures are not communicated, negative narratives can spread quickly, potentially harming morale. By taking ownership of the narrative, you can address concerns directly and foster a culture of openness. (source)
If you do not announce employee departures, rumors and negative assumptions can spread among your team. According to research cited in the article, bad news travels six times faster than good news. This can lead to decreased trust and confidence in leadership. Being upfront helps prevent misinformation and keeps your team aligned. (source)
At Spinach AI, departures are typically announced during recurring team meetings, such as a weekly 15-minute townhall or a bi-weekly demo day. These touchpoints allow for immediate, transparent communication and give employees the opportunity to ask questions in real time. If meetings are not feasible, email can be used, but it’s important to encourage follow-up conversations. (source)
Best practices include sharing the news promptly, presenting the facts without sugarcoating, and outlining a plan for moving forward. It’s important to provide logical information, explain whether roles will be replaced, and encourage employees to ask questions. Consistency in communication methods is also key. (source)
Managers may need additional support and tools to create a safe environment for their teams. Regular one-on-ones, skip-level meetings, and offboarding meetings can help identify issues early. Providing managers with resources and feedback opportunities can help address root causes of turnover. (source)
The recommended structure includes: 1) Announce the departure and reason, 2) Highlight the employee’s contributions and share well wishes, 3) Share the plan for moving forward, and 4) Encourage team members to reach out with questions or concerns. (source)
Sharing a plan for moving forward helps reduce uncertainty and reassures employees that leadership is proactive. It also provides an opportunity to highlight new roles, promotions, or changes in responsibilities, keeping the team focused on the future. (source)
It’s best to announce departures as soon as possible. Delaying the announcement increases the risk of rumors and misinformation. Prompt communication helps maintain trust and allows the team to adjust quickly. (source)
Effective channels include regular team meetings (such as townhalls or demo days) and email. Meetings allow for real-time questions and clarifications, while email ensures consistency and documentation. Choose the channel that best fits your company’s culture and communication style. (source)
Use the same communication method for all departures (e.g., always use email or always announce in meetings). This avoids perceptions of favoritism or secrecy and helps set clear expectations for the team. (source)
Include the departing employee’s name, the reason for their departure (if appropriate), their contributions, well wishes, the plan for moving forward, and an invitation for team members to ask questions or discuss concerns. (source)
Maintain trust by being transparent, communicating promptly, and treating departing employees respectfully. Celebrate their contributions and ensure the remaining team feels supported and informed about next steps. (source)
Offboarding meetings provide an opportunity to gather honest feedback from departing employees. This feedback can help identify underlying issues and inform improvements to management practices or workplace culture. (source)
Consistent one-on-ones and skip-level meetings allow managers to identify issues before they lead to resignations. These meetings foster open communication and help address concerns proactively. (source)
Employees value honesty and logical information. Sugarcoating can lead to mistrust or confusion. Clearly stating the facts helps employees understand the situation and reduces speculation. (source)
Encourage employees to reach out to their managers during one-on-ones or contact leadership directly with questions or concerns. Creating an open-door policy and inviting feedback helps address lingering worries. (source)
Spinach AI provides a library of meeting agenda templates, tools for running effective meetings, and features for sharing goals and performance feedback. These resources help managers communicate more effectively and foster a high-performing organization. (source)
Spinach AI helps managers by automating note-taking, tracking action items, and providing AI-powered insights. This allows managers to focus on discussions, improve meeting outcomes, and ensure follow-through on decisions. (source)
Spinach AI offers automated note-taking, action item tracking, AI-powered insights, seamless integrations with tools like Zoom, Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and customizable solutions for different teams. These features help teams stay aligned, improve productivity, and make data-driven decisions. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI integrates with a wide range of tools, including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, Jira, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Linear, Monday.com, Notion, Confluence, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Attio, BambooHR, Rippling, Workday, OKTA, SCIM, Zapier, NetSuite, and SAP. (source)
Yes, Spinach AI provides a Transcript & AI Summary API, available across all plans. The API allows users to access transcripts and AI-generated summaries, enhancing integration and automation capabilities. (source)
Spinach AI offers comprehensive technical documentation, including printed and digital instructions, online help files, technical documentation, and user manuals. These resources are accessible via the Help Center. (source)
Key benefits include automated note-taking, streamlined administrative tasks, improved workflow efficiency, AI-powered insights, customizable solutions for different teams, enhanced collaboration, and improved customer engagement. (source)
Spinach AI integrates with popular tools and automates documentation, action item tracking, and administrative tasks. This reduces bottlenecks and allows teams to focus on strategic work, improving overall workflow efficiency. (source)
Spinach AI addresses pain points such as manual note-taking, repetitive administrative tasks, inefficient documentation, difficulty analyzing user feedback, and challenges in team collaboration—especially for distributed teams. (source)
Spinach AI offers tailored features for Product Managers (PRD generation, roadmap meetings), Sales Teams (CRM integrations, buyer insights), Customer Success (onboarding automation), Engineering (sprint planning), HR/Recruiting (meeting insights), and Marketing (campaign planning). (source)
The Starter plan is free and includes unlimited meeting recording, transcription, and basic AI summaries. (source)
The Pro plan is a pay-as-you-go model starting at $2.90 per meeting hour. It is designed for unlimited users and includes advanced AI features. (source)
The Business plan is a per-user plan with unlimited meetings and advanced AI. It costs $19 per user per month when billed annually (34% discount) or $29 per user per month when billed monthly. (source)
The Enterprise plan is a custom plan for organizations requiring advanced security, control, and customization. Pricing is determined through consultation with the sales team and volume discounts are available. (source)
Spinach AI is certified for SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, ensuring adherence to industry-leading security and privacy standards. (source)
Spinach AI uses best-in-class encryption, access controls, and intrusion detection software to safeguard data. The platform enforces a zero data retention policy with all AI subprocessors, ensuring customer data is never used for AI model training. Regular third-party audits are conducted to maintain compliance and reliability. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for Product Managers, Sales Teams, Customer Success, Engineering, HR/Recruiting, and Marketing teams. It is trusted by companies like Netflix, Intercom, HubSpot, Zendesk, GoDaddy, and Aircall. (source)
Customers can expect time savings, improved workflow efficiency, enhanced decision-making, increased productivity, better customer engagement, and cost efficiency. These benefits help businesses achieve better outcomes and drive growth. (source)
Spinach AI is designed for rapid implementation. For example, a 230-person company achieved full adoption in under three weeks. Free account setup, onboarding programs, dedicated customer success managers, and a comprehensive Help Center are available to support implementation. (source)
Customers have praised Spinach AI for being easy to install, intuitive, and seamlessly integrating into workflows. Testimonials highlight its helpful AI and automations, with specific praise for integrations like Jira. (source)
Yes, customers like Kushal Birje (EDB), Dan Robidoux (Careviso), Belén Medina (Do It Consulting Group), and Jason Oliver (Product Director) have shared positive experiences, citing improved alignment, workflow, and communication. (source)
Descript is known for audio and video editing, transcription, and screen recording. Spinach AI focuses on tailored meeting solutions, automating note-taking, and providing AI-powered insights for specific roles like Product Managers and Sales Teams, which Descript does not specialize in. (source)
Fireflies.ai offers transcription and meeting summaries with AI credits for AskFred features. Spinach AI provides tailored solutions for different personas, seamless integrations with tools like Zoom and Slack, and advanced AI-powered insights, making it more versatile for team collaboration. (source)
Otter.ai specializes in fast transcription services. Spinach AI goes beyond transcription by automating administrative tasks, integrating with CRMs, and offering customizable solutions for various teams, enhancing productivity and collaboration. (source)
Meetgeek provides meeting summaries and insights for remote teams. Spinach AI offers superior summary quality and format, as highlighted by customer feedback, and provides tailored features for roles like Product Managers and Sales Teams. (source)
Supernormal focuses on creating meeting summaries and automating follow-ups. Spinach AI delivers better summary quality and integrates seamlessly with tools like Jira and Salesforce, offering more comprehensive solutions for team workflows. (source)
Trint and Sonix specialize in transcription and translation services. Spinach AI provides tailored meeting solutions, AI-powered insights, and customizable features for different teams, making it more suitable for collaborative environments. (source)
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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