company doesn’t want departing employees to send staff-wide “goodbye” emails

by Alison Green on June 11, 2015

A reader writes:

What do you and your readers think of good-bye “blast” emails that departing employees might send on their last day — the ones that say “it’s been great here and here’s my contact info,” etc.?

Some of the executives in my company are not a fan of those emails and we often get asked to tell employees (pretty much only those departing on good terms) not to send them out. I’m simply curious to know if we are the norm and most executives don’t like to see those emails or not.

And is there a particular way you would phrase it when addressing this with the departing employee? It’s not a policy of ours or stated in our handbook – it is simply the preference of some of our executives. They haven’t really explained why — simply made the request to ask people not to send them and expressed their displeasure if someone does (it happens occasionally if someone jumps the gun bit and sends one before we’ve had a chance to even process their departure). If I had to guess, I would say it has something to do with not wanting to draw attention to people departing. Maybe they feel it reflects poorly on them as a manager? I know that sounds a little nutty. We are not a large firm (under 300 employees) so departures are noticed regardless of good-bye emails. 

Goodbye emails are pretty normal, but unless you’re in a small office, it’s pretty common for people to send them just to their own team or people they worked with frequently rather than the whole company.

If you’re around 300 employees and people are sending their goodbye emails to the entire staff, I could see that being a bit much. I mean, let’s say you have 10% annual turnover (which is pretty average) — that would be a couple of these emails a month, which will feel like a lot if each one goes to the whole company. (And I could see managers cringing a bit at it feeling like a steady stream of departures to people who don’t have a big picture understanding of the turnover, when in fact that’s a pretty reasonable rate.)

I’d just suggest that people send them to their own team and anyone else they worked with closely. But if that hasn’t been the culture so far, it’s going to be a little awkward telling people to do that instead of the all-staff email they might have otherwise sent. You’d basically have to bite the bullet and tell departing employees, “Hey, we’re trying to move away from having departing people email the whole staff and instead just email their team and others they worked closely with” until the cultural norm on this changes on its own once enough people have handled it that way. If your company size has grown recently, you could frame it that way (“we’re now at the size where we feel like we should change how we do this since there are so many of us now”).

But you do risk it rubbing people the wrong way, if they’re the first ones to get that request. I don’t know that there’s really any way around that.

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  1. Jubilance*

    I’d think it was weird if I was told that I couldn’t send a good-bye email to my team when I left. I’d probably still do it, but from my personal account and not my company email account.

    1. Ask a Manager* Post author

      This wouldn’t be saying you couldn’t send it to your team though; she’d just be saying not to send it to the whole 300-person company. Would you still feel weird about it?

      1. Cautionary tail*

        I’ve seen them sent from both inside the company and from personal email accounts. When they are sent from personal email accounts they only go to specific individuals as there is no simple way to blast the whole company from the outside. When they are internally blasted to everyone (rare but not as rare as I’d like) I ignore the ones from people who I don’t know. IMHO opnion this doesn’t rise to the level that requires managerial intervention and I’ve never seen anyone else get upset over them.

        1. jmkenrick*

          Personally, I would be happy if random people I never worked with didn’t include me on their goodbye e-mails.

          Particularly because there are some people I genuinely want to keep in touch with, and if anyone includes kind words in their goodbye blast, it’s seriously diluted if I see that you’ve sent it to our entire org.

          1. afiendishthingy*

            Ditto. My department (maybe 50 people) is split between two locations and my contact with most of the people at the other office is limited to at MOST a staff meeting once a month. Sometimes people from the two offices are paired to work on the same case, but not usually. I get annoyed when I get a bunch of baby shower or something emails about someone I don’t know in that office. Emailing 300 people when you’re leaving? Just seems excessive to me, and potentially annoying some other people who aren’t speaking up because they’re not executives.

        2. sunny-dee*

          Yeah, I don’t see the big deal. Over the 9 years I’ve been at my company, between contracting and employment, I’ve worked on a dozen different projects, and others I’ve worked with have migrated around. If I wanted to contact only my former team members, it would easily be about 400 people, just because of the size of the teams and departments I’ve worked with. I’m not super close with most of those people, obviously, but it’s nice when I see a departure email (reminds me to connect on LinkedIn if I haven’t already), and I’d like to at least give all of them a heads-up if I were to leave. A company-wide mailing list is really easy for that, and easy to ignore if you don’t care.

      2. Elizabeth West*

        I can’t see any reason why I would send it to the entire company. Our company has over 5,000 employees total. I don’t even know everyone who works on my floor!

  2. Sue Wilson*

    My new job has the partners send them out, along with new organizational information, so it feels like both a way to honor the departing employee and information about what’s happening. But I agree the new contact info should definitely just go to the people they worked closely with.

    1. Stranger than fiction*

      I think this is great and the right way to do it IMO. I came here to say it’s also annoying when companies do not acknowledge or announce when someone has left and people are scratching their heads wondering why so and so hasn’t responded to their email…only to find out they’re not there anymore

      1. Rana*

        Or worse, you get the situation like I experienced. I was let go by my disorganized employers, only to discover after the fact that I was essential to a major project due in the next couple of weeks. (The person making the decision didn’t bother to consult my immediate supervisors.) Since I needed the money, I agreed to come back to help with the project at 150% pay.

        Except for the people responsible for the decision, and my supervisors, no one else had even known I’d been let go. They just thought I had been on vacation or something, and my return was viewed simply as me coming back from wherever I’d been temporarily. They were thus very surprised when I was hurt and reluctant when they insisted that I should come to the in-office going away party they were holding for another employee (who was leaving voluntarily) – a kindness I didn’t get because of how the higher-ups handled my departure.

        I liked my supervisors, but I do not miss working for that place.

    2. Daisy*

      I agree, including departures in some sort of weekly/montly update is classy and convenient.

    3. MsChanandlerBong*

      I sent my new contact info to the 11 people in my department. When my former boss found out about it, she called me at my new job to scream at me!

      1. Ms. Piggy*

        While not nice to be screamed at, it is nice to have it confirmed you 100% made the right move to get out of OldJob!
        (And I love your screen name)

  3. Traveller*

    At my last company, there was a limitation on who could actually send emails to the “All Staff” distribution. (As in, 2 or 3 people had the rights)

    Initially it had been as the OP described, anyone could send a note to the whole company when they left and some people would do just that (but the norm was more just selected teams).

    There was one (and only one) instance of an employee who wrote an incredibly rude ‘goodbye’ email to the whole company on the occasion of his departure — which presumably was not his idea.

    After that, if you wanted to send an ‘all company’ good by email, you would have to request it be sent on your behalf. Some people still did that, but they became much more rare.

    1. INTP*

      I think that limitation is a good policy. Most goodbye emails are harmless if a little annoying when you never worked with the person, but you never know. A previous coworker of mine sent an email to the entire seven story BUILDING when she was fired, which included all employees of our HQ office as well as several other companies. (The contents were pretty innocuous, just “Hey Jane, just so you know I left security card on your desk” but the way she did it was clearly to draw the attention of as many people as possible to the fact that she had been fired. Instead of addressing the email to the person whose desk she put her access card on, she replied all to an email sent by the facilities management people to all employees of all tenants about a facilities related thing.)

    2. KarenT*

      My company recently instated that policy as we were getting too many company wide emails (we’re huge though; 40,000 employees worldwide). I was getting company wide emails from all of the world!

    4. TheLazyB*

      I was one of about 10 people in my last company who could email the whole company. I thought restricting it was pretty standard.

      1. AntherHRPro*

        I agree, I thought a restriction on who could send organization-wide communications was fairly normal.

      2. sunny-dee*

        We have two company-wide mailing lists in my company. One is for Actual Important Company-Wide Emails, and only a very small handful of people (out of, like, 7000 maybe?) can post to it. The other is kind of a free-for-all and everyone can post pretty much whatever they want there, like a massive memo board.

        Most people ignore the second list (unless you like getting in arguments over Mac v Windows and that kind of thing), but that’s also the one where the mass good-bye emails go.

  4. INTP*

    I wonder if the executives are concerned that people will use the departing employees’ contact information to network for jobs at their new companies?

    Also, could this be written into policy somehow? I agree with Alison, it’s going to rub the first people to receive this request the wrong way. It might appear to be personal, like you don’t trust those employees not to poach your employees or say something nasty in the email or whatever. Putting it into official policy would show that it’s not. If OP has no control over the employee handbook or whatever, she could just declare it a team policy based on preferences of upper management or whatever.

      1. KarenT*

        Or because execs are getting annoyed with getting so many unneeded emails.

        I remember being in a high level meeting once (I was an entry level employee taking notes) that was attended by VPs and above. They all had their blackberries on the table. They all buzzed at once, so they all picked them up and read the same email. They all started making faces and one or two made a comment about ridiculous company-wide emails. When I got back to my desk, I checked my email and found this:

        “Dear Company: Someone has taken the large hole punch from MY DESK. That is THEFT. It is MY HOLE PUNCH. I need it to do my job. RETURN it by the END OF THE DAY!!!!!!!!!!”

        2. TootsNYC*

          Most people in my business unit would rather not get those emails. And a lot of people roll their eyes and consider them goopy. And annoying.

          But I don’t know that it’s worth intervening, personally.

          If I truly wanted to change that sort of thing, I’d start with the next people to leave, and get out in front. I’d say: “We’re going to send out an email on the Monday of your last week to your department, detailing how your duties will be changed, and wishing you well. Please tell us who, outside your department, would need to know this. And would you like us to include your contact info for people, or maybe just tell them they can find you on LinkedIn? And then would you make your email be only to those few people that you want to give your cell phone number to, etc.? Make your goodbyes in person. We’re trying to cut down on the big company-wide emails.”

          1. Jerry Vandesic*

            I think it depends on the culture of the organization. If the leadership openly shares departures, then it’s probably not necessary for a widely distributed email. On the other hand, some organizations (some of which I have worked for) treat any departures as closely held secrets; you don’t know someone has left until you try to invite them to a meeting and they are not in the system. In cases like the latter, the emails from people leaving the company help me understand attrition, and it really doesn’t matter if I know them or not.

            1. Anonymosity*

              Ours has a page on the company intranet for departed employees. It doesn’t give any reasons; it just says their names. They don’t make any distinction between people who leave voluntarily and those who don’t. Though I did hear when I started that it’s pretty hard to get fired around here.

      2. Dove*

        Nah, it’s growing pains — I’ve been with companies that are going through the transition from being a genuinely small business, maybe the founder is still there even, to at about 150 employees suddenly often needing to rethink its structure and operations (to support this many people’s livelihoods, for one thing). And the blast goodbye email is often one of the things that gets noticed at about a couple hundred people (usually because there are a few bitter blasts). Every company I’ve been at just implements a no companywide email policy going forward; if you want something to appear companywide, submit it to HR to include in the its daily brief email, though they won’t publish a companywide goodbye email.

        1. AnonAnalyst*

          Yeah, I was thinking something similar. I’ve mainly worked at small companies and it was totally normal to send the goodbye all staff email — because you knew and had worked with (to some degree) everyone in the company. I can see how this would go from being the typical thing that everyone does when the company’s smaller to being a problem when the company gets bigger, because everyone who’s worked there until now has seen it done this way even though it no longer really makes sense for the way the company operates now.

        2. Inquiring Minds*

          The policy on no companywide emails is an interesting idea. So is limiting who can send them. Something to think about and bring up to my boss. Thankfully, the emails that have been sent out haven’t been rude, or offensive, or negative, but if that ever happened my execs would go through the roof.

        3. Daisy*

          It was the same with my university- it’s been around for ages, but in the space of a few years it went from being a smallish local-ish operation,to a big corporate institution that is devoted to attracting rich international students. A dozen mass emails to the whole place in the space of a couple of weeks, of the “has anyone seen a pink USB I think I left it in the library thnx!!!!” type, and suddenly you couldn’t do that anymore. It makes sense.

      3. neverjaunty*

        I find that companies that DO have high turnover are especially touchy about this.

    2. Inquiring Minds*

      Hi, the OP here. Thanks for everyone’s comments! I’ve been wondering if we are unusual or the norm? And I hadn’t thought about the networking fear aspect! I could definitely see that being a reason. It’s awkward having to tell employees not to send these emails. I try and say it in the nicest and least offensive way possible. Especially for those departing voluntarily. It feels like there is a reason they are leaving (whatever that may be) and this just adds to the list. I’m probably overthinking that, but that’s how it feels sometimes when I have to say to someone who may, or may not, have been thinking of sending an email at all ‘don’t say good-bye via email.’ The last employee I had to tell this to had the best response, I thought. He said ‘I was not planning on sending one. Prefer the more personal touch of actually going around and saying goodbye.’ 

      1. AntherHRPro*

        You may want to frame it that these types of communications are best when sent to people they know and want to stay in contact with. Especially if they are including personal contact info. Do they really want every person at the company to have their cell/email address? Do you really want to tell everyone you will miss them when in fact you won’t miss some. It is best to send a heartfelt message to those you really want to communicate with.

  5. S*

    I used to work in a small organization–when I left, my manager sent a goodbye announcement for me the morning of my last day (all-staff email with me cc’ed on it). I followed it up in the afternoon with my contact info and a thank-you to everyone who had sent private messages throughout the day. And I wasn’t bothered at all by this; the company culture was very close-knit and I did feel like I was leaving ~the family~, and to get an official announcement and goodbye messages brought a smile to my face. It would’ve felt weirder if I didn’t get any of those things, you know?

    But it’s very much a cultural thing at each office–something like that wouldn’t be okay at some places, while obviously at my old job, this was the norm. There’s very low turnover at my new place, so I haven’t seen what a goodbye email would look like yet, but I can’t imagine my current manager sending out the announcement for me!

  6. Lily in NYC*

    We have 400 people and an embarrassingly high turnover rate (example: 4 people in our 50-person division left this week). Everyone sends those goodbye emails to our entire office, and it really does make it feel like we have a revolving door. People try to one-up each other in the emails, which is starting to get annoying. I just delete them without reading unless I know the person.

  7. Maxwell Edison*

    When I left ToxicJob, with a couple exceptions I only sent my goodbye email to people I was actually going to miss. If a person was one of the reasons I was leaving, they didn’t get the goodbye email.

    1. Elizabeth West*

      I didn’t get a chance to send anyone anything at Exjob. I went to lunch and when I came back, I got laid off. People got in touch with me via Facebook afterward.

  8. Ad Astra*

    Pretty much any all-staff email that doesn’t come from, like, the CEO or HR makes me cringe. It’s almost always better to send emails based on physical location (our system even lets us select which floor we want to email) or department or something. Very few messages are actually relevant to all 300 employees, and those that are relevant are often too sensitive for email anyway.

    1. jag*

      “Pretty much any all-staff email that doesn’t come from, like, the CEO or HR makes me cringe.”

      Where this is good or bad depends how big your company/organization is. I’m in an organization with 50 staff in 8 locations on four continents. Lots of us send quality all-staff messages from time to time. I just sent one today – everyone should be aware of it. I lead external communications in the organization.

      1. jag*

        Annnd……just got good query from our South Africa office (I’m in an office in the US) to the note I sent today to all staff.

      2. Ad Astra*

        We have about 500 employees in 40 locations and I would have no reason to ever talk to probably 60 percent of them. Every all-company email I’ve seen has involved something like benefits, security, or IT stuff. We do make frequent use of an intranet for company news and announcements and such, including a weekly update from HR about who’s coming and who’s leaving.

      3. Elizabeth the Ginger*

        Yes, company size makes a lot of difference, as does how closely people work together. I teach at a school with about 80 faculty & staff, and we have two fairly active mailing lists that everyone is subscribed to. One is for news (special assembly tomorrow, please fill out this survey about professional development, etc.) and one for community (baby photos from someone on maternity leave, bookcase up for grabs). Goodbye emails generally go on the latter.

        It’s only about 5-10 emails a day, though, with the majority being news items and truly important to everyone. Also, because we’re using Gmail, people have the option to filter out the mailing lists so those emails don’t appear right in their inboxes.

    2. lawsuited*

      I’ve worked 2 places where this was the modus operandi. At the first place, when I resigned I was told not to tell anyone because the company wanted to “handle it in their own way”. Unfortunately their way of handling it was to tell no one, and ask me wait until after hours to leave with my things so I wouldn’t be seen. According to my co-workers (I let those I was close to know after I left on the Friday), management has never acknowledged that I left, and my co-workers were left to deduce what had happened from seeing my empty office on Monday morning. At the second place, I was told not to tell anyone, but the company apparently expected that I would tell people anyway and that the news would travel “through the grapevine” without them having to make an announcement. I followed direction and didn’t tell anyone, which resulted in a lot of confusion and tears when staff saw me take down the pictures from my wall and leave the office on my last day.

  9. Partly Cloudy*

    At my old job, someone in the HR department would send the company-wide departure emails (only if it was a higher ranking person who had had interaction with most of the recipients). I guess the person leaving could then send their own email to their actual friends and people they wanted to keep in touch with. When I left, there was no need as I was already connected with personal emails, LinkedIn, or Facebook with that group of people.

  10. Mike C.*

    I just hope this policy isn’t used to completely cover up the fact that people leave. There is nothing more unnerving to have coworkers just vanish.

    1. Naomi*

      This happened recently at my company. Someone I worked closely with just vanished. I only found out she was gone for good like a week later when I tried to send her an email. Normally there are company wide emails, but I think there must have been some sort of drama since she just left so suddenly.

      1. TootsNYC*

        That’s actually one of the arguments for NOT doing company-based “Wakeen is leaving us” emails. Because if you forget to do one for Jane, you leave the impression that *she* was fired.

        1. Mike C.*

          But you need some sort of notification as to who is taking on their responsibilities. One crazy case I saw was the mail room guy suddenly going “poof” and spending a week wondering why I wasn’t receiving any equipment.

      1. Windchime*

        Yes, I think it’s very weird when people just disappear. We usually get department-wide email from a manager that says some version of, “Jon Snow has resigned his position effective immedately and is no longer with Our Company. We wish him well.” If the person is leaving on good terms and giving notice, that person will usually send a goodbye email to their team. We have over a thousand employees and it would be really weird to get a company wide email for that.

  11. Mimmy*

    Whew! Good to know this is normal! When I was laid off from my nonprofit job, I sent a good-bye email to a bunch of staff I’d had close contact with–I don’t think it was to everybody; I think it was just to those who didn’t come into the office regularly (the in-office staff had thrown me a party the Friday before). Later, I remember thinking, “I hope that wasn’t weird!” I just felt like it was the nice thing to do. One woman I was particularly close with called me shortly after I’d sent the email.

    I had one manager at a different job who sent a note to select individuals on my last day or so. That was a little awkward but a nice gesture.

    But a company-wide email, either by the departing employer or someone on that employee’s behalf? Nope. I’d say that is overkill, except maybe if it is a high-ranking person (e.g. department director or above). The employer I mentioned above used to send an email to the WHOLE COMPANY–a couple hundred employees I’d say–if an employee was “no longer with Teapot Foundation” and to direct questions to the person’s manager. Awkward indeed!

    1. Rater Z*

      I’ have only done it once, some twenty years ago. In my case, I was a rate clerk at a company with about 60 terminals. There were six or seven of us at night in the home office but I was mainly the contact point for a lot of them and I was usually the person they called to fix mistakes. Information on a freight bill transfers over to a lot of other places in the system.

      I had been there seven years but decided to leave at my next chance and it wound up being with our partnership carrier. We didn’t cover the south but they did while they didn’t cover the north and midwest while we did so we each routinely delivered that freight for the other. It was a good deal for each and our customers. Other trucking companies had similar arrangements.

      As I was leaving on my last night, I sent out the message to everyone that I was leaving, where I was going and that it was primarily for family reasons since it would put us 500 miles closer to my wife’s family as opposed to 900 miles. I wished everyone the best for the future, both for the company and the individuals reading the message. It went out as I was leaving so that I wouldn’t be hit with questions. It wouldn’t have surprised me if over 500-750 people in the company knew who I was and what I did even though I was in frequent contact with perhaps 60 or 70 and knew 25-30 by face.

      Perhaps six weeks later, I had a letter from one of the VPs who had checked into a vacation day I had not been paid for when I left. Turned out I had forgotten about one I had taken but in her letter, she mentioned my last message to everyone and said how classy it was.

  12. Jake*

    I sent my email to the folks I wanted to keep in touch with. I’m surprised to hear that anybody would send a good bye email to the entire company.

  13. LBK*

    I can’t imagine you actually know all 300 people well enough that they’d be interested in reading a personal goodbye from you. It seems weird to send it to anyone except those you worked with directly.

    2. Adam*

      I was hoping it meant the company provided pastry turnovers twice a month.

      …I’ll see myself out.

      2. A Bug!*

        We’re proud to say we have a 95% weekly turnover rate at our company! The other 5% can’t have gluten, so we bring in rice krispy squares for them.

        2. misspiggy*

          I want to work for you!

          My first week at Previous Place, trays of doughnuts were everywhere, donated by a baker for staff to buy as a fundraising thing. That’s how to get employee participation in your annual funding drive…

        3. ID10T Detector*

          Rice Krispies (the actual brand) aren’t gluten free, but there are off brands that are.

          As a Celiac, I appreciate the thought you put into it!

  15. Fuzzyfuzz*

    I guess I don’t understand the objection to staff-wide goodbye emails if your organization is up to mid-size. It is customary in our organization (about 250 FT employees) for people to do this, and I actually like it. With the nature of our jobs, some of us only work together at a certain point per year, so it’s useful to know this information as you head into the next cycle. If executives don’t like this for any reason other than they think it’s annoying, what’s wrong the delete button?

  16. STJ*

    My company solves the problem by restricting who can send emails to certain employee groups.

    Only a few people and HR staff can send to all. Most others can only sent to their department groups, or groups of those they work closely with.

  17. MaryMary*

    At OldJob, the employee’s manager would send an email to the immediate team announcing the employee’s departure and succession plans if there were any. The employee would generally send a less formal email to their favorite coworkers, even if they no longer worked together directly. People moved from team to team a lot, it would have been weird to email the entire division if someone left, but natural to tell someone you’ve worked with off and on for years. It also means you aren’t sharing send your personal email address with everyone.

    NewJob seems to go the route of no formal annoucement or email at all. It makes it awkward when you ask about someone who quit a month ago.

  18. Stranger than fiction*

    I dont have a lot of experience with seeing goodbye emails at jobs but I just remembered one that brought a tear to my eye. It was from an outside sales rep so made perfect sense he’d send one since he was remote and couldn’t say goodbye in person. The subject line read “Last transmission from Ken…” and the email was so professional nice and concise. It did go to the whole company which was only <50 people

  19. Margaret*

    At our firm, of about 80 people,it is customary to send an email to All if people are leaving on good terms. Occasionally someone might send it to just the people they’re closest too/worked with the most, but I think that’s less common. There is also an email to all (sometimes a stand alone email, sometimes included in a daily news email that consolidates things to minimize emails to all in general) when someone gives notice to announce when their last day is coming up. We’re maybe on the larger side of this being appropriate, but I think it still is. We’re basically comprised of two departments, that work together on the same clients a lot (plus admin and a few exceptions), and there aren’t permanent teams (though you might tend to work with the same people a lot), but many different configurations of teams of varying sizes on different clients, so the odds that you work with a given person on at least one project throughout the year is relatively high.

    If we got much larger, maybe 150+, I could see it being reasonable to request that such emails are sent only to your department plus select people on the other side that you worked with; I think if you’re a company of 300+ I can see a concern of just the number of such emails being high (even if as a percentage it’s not); but I think a proper response from management would be to ask people to be more selective in who they send the email to, not to ask them to cease doing it altogether.

  20. Adam*

    My company is just large enough that about half of them probably couldn’t match my name with my face. I don’t feel the need to say goodbye to all of them whenever that occurs. I’d probably send a goodbye email to my department to be polite, but mainly to the people I had good relationships with. No need to for me to clog the servers with a 100+ recipient goodbye note when most of them don’t know who I am anyways. :)

  21. Beaker*

    Sending to the whole company seems a little strange. Why would you want everyone to have your contact info, especially if you’ve never talked to them? We have an internal website where they post ‘Good luck to the following employees who are spending their last day with us:’ whenever people leave (we have around 3,000 employees worldwide) but even that is provided by the employee’s supervisor.

  22. AllieJ*

    The bigger problem at offices I’ve worked in is not the goodbye email but the reply all responses. One “thanks so much I’m headed to a great opportunity at X, call Y for updates on projects” is fine. But getting tons of reply all “Great!” “Congrats!” “We will miss you!” afterwards gets old fast.

  23. Erin*

    I think rules like this (albeit an unofficial rule in this case) are typically only put in place because something has gone wrong at some point in the past. Someone probably sent an inappropriate goodbye email at some point, prompting the powers at be to try to ban them altogether.

  24. Ghost Pepper*

    My work is exactly like yours, OP.

    On top of that, if you resign, HR tells you not to even *verbally* tell anyone you’re resigning. It’s like you have to keep it a secret.

    I really don’t understand the reasoning for this, other than it might affect morale? Weird.

  25. Xanthippe Lannister Voorhees*

    While I wouldn’t particularly care to receive a “goodbye” email from someone I never worked closely with (and in a large company, possibly didn’t know) unless they were coming to my inbox with incredible frequency or people were abusing the “reply all” feature on them it really wouldn’t annoy me enough to wish they’d stop doing it.

  26. TotesMaGoats*

    So, I sent an email during my last week to people. Not everyone but a lot of people. I Bcc’d to avoid the reply all issue and mentioned that the email was Bcc’d to save inboxes. I kind of wished that I could’ve emailed everyone who was stateside because I know I forgot people and I feel bad about it. I can understand management not wanting the employee to send a massive email to everyone upon their departure but perhaps the solution is for management to send it for them or something like that. 300 doesn’t seem large to me.

  27. Long Time Reader First Time Poster*

    I was part of a layoff where my manager was let go as well.

    The day after the layoff, he sent a lengthy email to the entire company (about 100 people) that was the most meandering, navel-gazing, sentimental, maudlin piece of crap I’ve ever seen (someone forwarded it to me as I was already gone). He even quoted Peter Tosh, which led us to assume he was baked when he wrote it. He was and still is a laughingstock thanks to that email.

    Moral of the story: if your post-layoff coping mechanisms include a bong, stay away from the laptop if you know what’s good for you.

  28. EvilQueenRegina*

    The strangest one I ever received was from this one guy in the mail room who had only been there for a few weeks covering someone else’s absence. He sent a goodbye email to the building wide distribution list which included several baby photos of himself! No one knew quite why he had done that. And my team weren’t even based in that building any more having moved out two years earlier but for some weird reason everyone kept getting added to that list even after we moved. So most of us had never even met this person.

  29. Snick*

    I had a cowoerker who did the farewell email blast that included all grievances and an accurate, if unprofessional review of management. Yikes! Needless to say the person was escorted from the building immediately.

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