The Person Resigns
They resign to their employer, and you may find out second, which is a problem to solve before it happens.
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.
A resignation is served on the employer, which is the provider. You may find out second, through an account manager, several days later.
The practical lesson in “The Person Resigns” is that a third-party arrangement still leaves day-to-day management with the operating team. Used for hourly timesheet template, hourly timesheet template can make time and project context easier to review, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.
That delay is a problem with a simple fix, and the fix has to be arranged before anybody resigns.
For a separate perspective on “The Person Resigns”, consult the KPMG workforce insights. Compare it with the actual contract, country and operating process rather than using a general resource as a local conclusion.
The notification arrangement
Ask the provider to tell a named mailbox at your company immediately on any resignation or termination, in addition to telling your account manager.
Put it in the agreement at signature. Most providers will agree; none offer it unprompted.
Asking the person too
Say at the start that if they ever resign you would like to hear it from them directly as well. Most people would anyway, and saying so removes any doubt about whether it is permitted.
In practice their message usually arrives first, which is the point.
It also avoids the awkward situation where somebody is managing you carefully for a week because they have resigned and believe they are not allowed to say so.
Why the delay matters
Access revocation, handover planning, work reallocation and recruitment all start from the date you find out rather than the date they resigned.
A week lost at the front of a notice period is a week not spent on handover, and handover is the only thing that matters here.
The notice period
Theirs, under their contract, and possibly longer or shorter than you assume. It is also the period during which you may or may not be entitled to their work, depending on local rules.
Check it the day you hear. Planning a handover against the wrong number is a common and avoidable error.
Ask the provider to confirm the last working day in writing, since the date the person believes and the date their contract produces are occasionally different.
The handover
Entirely yours to run and the single highest-value thing available in the remaining weeks.
For somebody who has been working alone in another country, the undocumented knowledge is usually larger than anybody expects. Start on day one of the notice period, not in the final week.
Where there is nobody to hand over to, record it instead: a written account, a walkthrough, anything that survives the person. That is worth more than an incomplete handover to somebody who will have forgotten it by the time they need it.
What only they know
Accounts, access, relationships, scheduled jobs, workarounds, the reason something is done the way it is.
Ask directly for a list:
- Accounts and access nobody else holds.
- Relationships outside the company.
- Scheduled jobs and anything that runs unattended.
- Workarounds, and the reason each exists.
- Anything they have been meaning to write down.
People produce a good one when asked and nobody volunteers it.
Counter-offers
Possible, and slow. A salary change takes four to six weeks through the normal mechanism, which is longer than most notice periods.
Ask the provider whether it can be expedited before promising anything. This is the clearest case where the structural delay actually costs you a person.
Finding out why
Your own exit interview process does not cover them and the provider's offboarding is a form.
Ask yourself, informally, and ask it in a way that permits an honest answer. For somebody leaving an arrangement like this, the real reason is frequently structural rather than about the work.
The reference
They may need one and the formal reference comes from their employer, which can only confirm dates and title.
Offering a written account of what they actually did, from the people who saw it, is worth a great deal to them and costs an hour. It is also the thing most likely to make them speak well of you.
Final pay and entitlements
Calculated and paid by the provider: notice, accrued leave, anything the country requires.
Confirm it happened. Mistakes at this point land on somebody who has left and no longer has a route back to anybody who can fix them.
Replacing them
Recruitment is yours, the provider does not do it, and the role may have been the only one in that country.
Decide quickly whether you are replacing in the same country or elsewhere, because the answer changes whether the service continues at all.
Where you are not replacing, give the provider notice promptly. An empty arrangement continues to cost a monthly fee and a minimum term until somebody ends it.
What the arrangement cannot tell you
Whether you could have kept them. A person leaving an employer they have no relationship with, managed by a company that cannot promote them, in a structure where pay moves only if somebody remembers to start it, is leaving a set of conditions as much as a job.
The honest post-mortem asks which of those conditions you created and which the structure did. Both answers are useful, and only the first is something you can do anything about next time.