What is an employee worth?
When people stayed with companies for all their working lives they would get the “gold carriage clock” when they retired. Even more recently when staying at a company for more than a few years has become unusual, when an employee leaves, one expects a small gift. So after leaving the company where I’d worked for two and a half years, regularly in excess of 50 hour weeks, was I wrong to actually expect something?
When members of my team had left I went out of my way to make sure that, for their last day, they had something appropriate as a leaving gift so that they knew they would be missed and that they had been valued. One of my team even bought me gifts when they left!
Today was my last day and although I wasn’t anticipating anything big, I honestly thought that the company was sad to see me go and I’d get something.
At my leaving lunch I was given a card, signed by half the staff, with nothing inside. Back at the office, nothing more was said, so I got ready to slope off. I was told there had been a “modest” collection and would I “like a bottle of scotch?”. I was given nothing as a gesture, not even a bunch of flowers, and I felt that the company didn’t care that I was going.
30 months of dedicated work and I wasn’t valued enough for a leaving gift (or the time to sort one out), which really underlines that I made the correct decision in leaving.