The Ending That Is Two Endings
Your notice to the provider and the person's employment are two different endings on two different clocks.
Ending the service agreement
Ending the person's employment
Moving them to your own entity
The person simply resigning
YoursThe provider'sCrosses the twoNeither contract
Four matters, and no share: what any one agreement covers differs by agreement. One crosses both, and the handoff is where these arrangements fail. Three endings, and only one of them is yours to start and finish.
What ending this arrangement actually consists of, part by part
YouThe providerNeither contractGiving notice to end the service agreement
A commercial act, on the notice period in your own contract, addressed to the provider
Ending the person's employment
An employment act, under local law, which the provider must carry out and may be slow or constrained
Making the two clocks line up
Thirty days commercial against ninety days employment, in documents that do not reference each other
Across the handoff: Your notice date, the person's notice and any local process, and whoever funds the period where the two do not overlap
Paying for the gap where they do not line up
Salary, employer costs and the fee for every month the employment outlasts your notice
Telling the person
Two communications from two companies about one event, usually uncoordinated
Across the handoff: An agreement with the provider on who says what and when, made before either of you says anything
Whether the person lands somewhere
In no document and owned by nobody, which is why so many of these endings are worse than they needed to be
YoursThe provider'sCrosses the twoNeither contract
Six matters drawn · no share
Six parts to one ending, and the two that cross are where the cost and the damage are. One buyer's own unwinding; notice periods, processes and what must be paid differ by jurisdiction and by contract.
Ending the service and ending the person's employment are two different acts, on two different clocks, in two documents that do not reference each other. Your notice stops the service; it does not stop the job.
The practical lesson in “The Ending That Is Two Endings” is that a third-party arrangement still leaves day-to-day management with the operating team. Used for key person dependency, how global teams can evaluate key person dependency can make time and project context easier to review, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.
Where the clocks differ, you pay for the gap, and almost nobody checks the two numbers until they need to.
The McKinsey people and organisation insights provides an external reference for the issue raised in “The Ending That Is Two Endings”. It is most useful when the team records which principles apply to this arrangement and which require local advice.
The arithmetic, first
Your notice to the provider. The person's notice under their contract. Any local process that has to run before employment can end.
Add them up:
- Your notice to the provider.
- The person's notice under their employment contract.
- Any local process that must run before employment can end.
The total is the earliest realistic end, and it is frequently twice what the buyer assumed.
Do it at signature rather than at the end. It is the same five minutes either way and only one of them is useful.
Where the gap comes from
A thirty-day commercial notice against a ninety-day employment notice leaves sixty days of salary, employer costs and fees with nothing to set against them.
In several countries the employment notice cannot be shortened even by agreement, which means the gap is not negotiable.
What your agreement should say
That the provider will terminate the employment on your instruction, what notice is required, who bears the cost of the employment notice period, and what happens to accrued entitlements.
Read it at signature. Nobody has leverage to clarify it at the point of use.
Severance and statutory payments
Many countries require a payment on termination, calculated by service and salary. It is payable by the employer and funded by you.
Ask for the formula for each country you hire in, once. It is the single largest unbudgeted number in most unwindings.
It also grows with service, which means the cost of ending rises quietly each year the arrangement continues. A figure checked at signature is out of date by year three.
Accrued leave
Paid out at the end almost everywhere. A person who has taken little leave over two years is a bill you have been accruing without watching.
The monthly leave balance report exists for this reason. Reading it occasionally turns a surprise into a provision.
Garden leave and whether it exists
Not universally available, and in some countries requiring the person to be given work during notice.
Where you need them not working, ask what is actually possible rather than assuming the arrangement you are used to.
The same question covers access. Where somebody must keep working through notice, revoking their systems on the day they are told is both unkind and probably a breach of their contract.
Sequencing the conversations
Agree with the provider who tells the person, when, and in what words, before anybody says anything.
The ordinary failure is the person hearing it from their manager, informally, before their employer has initiated anything. That is covered elsewhere and it does its most damage here.
What the person is owed in practice
Notice, accrued leave, any statutory payment, and the documents their country requires on leaving. The provider handles all of it.
Confirm it has happened rather than assuming. Offboarding errors are invisible to you and fall entirely on somebody who no longer has a route back to anybody.
Your own offboarding
Access, equipment, ownership transfers, documentation, the handover of whatever only they knew.
None of it is the provider's and all of it has to be started earlier than you would internally, because the dates are set by somebody else.
Write the list before you need it. Doing it from memory during a notice period guarantees that something only this person knew leaves with them.
Doing it well anyway
A proper handover, an honest reference, a letter describing what they actually did, and a conversation that is not purely administrative.
Nothing requires any of it. It is the difference between an ending somebody describes neutrally and one they describe badly, in a market you may want to hire in again.
Learning from it
Ask why, informally. Your own exit process does not cover them and the provider's is a form.
The answer is the only information available about whether the next arrangement should be structured differently, and it is free.
What you cannot control at the end
How the provider conducts a termination locally. The process is theirs, the law is local, and your influence is that of a customer giving notice rather than an employer directing an outcome.
A provider with a reputation for handling endings decently is worth more than a point of margin, and you cannot find that out at the point you need it. It is learned beforehand, from other buyers, which is why it belongs in the selection questions rather than in this note.