Letter advising employee has left

Use our letter to notify external third parties, such as clients and customers, of an employee’s departure. Make sure you take prompt steps to arrange a handover of their work to another employee or new recruit as you don’t want to lose business as a result.

A hasty departure

Where an employee resigns amicably and is working out a notice period of one month or more, you should have time to ensure there’s a proper handover of work to another employee and that this happens before the outgoing employee departs. However, sometimes it’s not that straightforward. The employee may only be on a short notice period, or they may have been dismissed and paid in lieu of notice, or they may have been placed on garden leave for their notice period. In this scenario, you probably won’t have the luxury of being able to arrange a proper handover of work but it’s still important that you decide how you are going to inform relevant external third parties, such as your clients, customers and suppliers, of the employee’s departure. You don’t want to end up losing valuable business because of a breakdown in communication caused by an employee leaving!

Notification

You can use our Letter Advising Employee Has Left to advise your clients and customers of your employee having left. It doesn’t make a big thing of their exit or set out why they have gone as the importance is to focus on getting appropriate arrangements in place to move forward with your business relationships. Therefore, we have given you two optional paragraphs. One is for use where you’re still in the process of appointing a new point of contact and the other is for use where you have already appointed an individual to this role. Whichever paragraph you use, it will hopefully give your client or customer the comfort they need to know you have the matter in hand. It is particularly important that relevant external third parties are informed of an employee’s departure where the circumstances under which your employee left were not amicable. For example, if an employee has resigned to set up in competition or has been poached by a competitor, you don’t want them trying to steal your business. With this in mind, our letter requests the third party not to discuss any further matters with the ex-employee and asks that if the ex-employee does try to contact them on work-related matters, to refer them straight back to you.