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Employees and employers alike have the right under at-will employment laws in almost all states to end their relationship without notice, for any reason, but the two-week rule is a widely accepted standard of workplace conduct. Now Sue Shellenbarger writes at The Wall Street Journal that employers say a growing number of workers are leaving without giving two weeks' notice.
Some bosses blame young employees who feel frustrated by limited prospects or have little sense of attachment to their workplace. But employment experts say some older workers are quitting without notice as well. They feel overworked or unappreciated after years of laboring under pay cuts and expanded workloads imposed during the recession. One employee at Dupray, a customer-service rep, scheduled a meeting and announced she was quitting, then rose and headed for the exit. She seemed surprised when the director of human resources stopped her and explained that employees are expected to give two weeks' notice. "She said, 'I've been watching 'Suits,' and this is how it happens,' " referring to the TV drama set in a law firm.
According to Shellenbarger, quitting without notice is sometimes justified. Employees with access to proprietary information, such as those working in sales or new-product development, face a conflict of interest if they accept a job with a competitor. Employees in such cases typically depart right away—ideally, by mutual agreement. It can also be best to exit quickly if an employer is abusive, or if you suspect your employer is doing something illegal.
More often, however, quitting without notice "is done in the heat of emotion, by someone who is completely frustrated, angry, offended or upset," says David Lewis, president of OperationsInc., a Norwalk, Conn., human-resources consulting firm. That approach can burn bridges and generate bad references. Phyllis Hartman says employees have a responsibility to try to communicate about what's wrong. "Start figuring out if there is anything you can do to fix it. The worst that can happen is that nobody listens or they tell you no."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday June 28 2016, @06:37AM
Let's face it, HR isn't going to give us two weeks notice of being fired. And until you've signed the paperwork and started elsewhere, that job can still be yanked after you've given notice. So let's not feel bad for employers here, they pull awful tricks themselves.
I've seen fellow IT people give two weeks and quickly get escorted out the door, usually with that notice period paid. We don't want people with no vested interest with keys to the kingdom, and we're not going to let them sit around giving everyone else the idea that the grass is greener elsewhere or otherwise being a distraction. Documentation? Hahaha.
Then there was one rusty douchenozzle that we escorted out upon his notice because we were just waiting for him to quit and had an re-org planned post-departure. No severance for you, sucker.
The only rage quit I saw was a graphic designer who upon seeing two of his late 30s female colleagues let go the same day, proceeded to loudly drop the C-bomb repeatedly at their manager for being the cause of the problems. "You cost two women their jobs because of your own incompetence! Go F yourself you f'n C!" I don't recall him actually saying "I quit" but after he walked out it was decided it wasn't absolutely required in that case.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Marco2G on Tuesday June 28 2016, @07:01AM
I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept of two weeks notice and how often this is more like a guideline than a rule in the US (at least it seems that way from what reaches me).
In Switzerland, you very often have three months periods and one month mandated by law if you've passed the probation phase in which you have one week of notice mandated by law.
You can easily be sued for compensation if you just don't show up anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @07:16AM
I've worked mostly shitty service industry jobs. There were employees who didn't show up for a week straight. There was actually company policy that ignoring work for a week was an automatic firing offense (and maybe people used it in just that manner.) The flipside was: Only one of those jobs ever did full time pay. Most of them kept you at either 20 or 30 hours a week, and would push up to 38 or 39 during holiday seasons then cut you down to 20 for a few weeks after. Since they all used rotating schedules rather than fixed schedules they impaired your ability to work the second or third job needed to actually pay your bills. Then they would complain about people not being 'one of the team' while giving sales big bonuses and only talking to us back end service-people when something went wrong (say merchandising fuckups on the floor, despite the fact that we left them clean and organized and sales/cashier personnel were supposed to do that during lulls in business.)
Long story short, I applaud people quitting like that and hitting them where it hurts: In labor shortages that impact their bottom line. It beats the alternative, which was less morally upright people becoming offending by that treatment and instead performing shrinkage on store store. At least two, maybe three of the jobs I worked at had personnel doing that. I heard of it secondhand from being doing it during college, and also viewed it firsthand in my own jobs. Being a usually new employee and them the 'more established employee' I wasn't usually in a position to disclose their activities to management without blowback on myself, and most of the time management was too busy jerking off to discover it themselves. In the more bureacratic places LP took care of it eventually, but the smaller businesses it only got taken care of when they finally performed some other fireable offense.
Not a way to run a business or a culture, but somehow the same mistakes on both side are repeated.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2016, @08:01AM
I've been in a special case of that situation. The new CEO came from a similar job at a bank, so he was keen on security. When a colleague and I lost our jobs, they revoked all our access before sending the e-mail that we had lost our jobs[1]. But over here, the law requires the company to give us three months notice (depends on hos long you've been at the company, after five years it becomes six months notice), and the owner of the company didn't want to pay us after leaving.
As a result, for three months, we had to show up at work, but had no access to do our jobs. My colleague did get to write some documentation, but I'd been writing documentation for the previous months, so I had nothing to do.
We ended up each writing a game in the notice period.
[1] That was supposed to include our VPN access, that we needed to read e-mail, including the notice that we lost our jobs. I wonder how they would have handled it if the operations guys hadn't failed to disable our VPN access.