Sathnam Sanghera: Sorry You're Leaving!

Sorry You're Leaving!

So, you’re leaving. You’ve informed your line manager of your decision and worked out your notice. You’ve resisted giving the chairman a piece of your mind and stolen the requisite number of Post-It notes. You’ve started falling ill on Mondays and Fridays and spotted your PA making a contribution of just one pound in the inevitable whip-round for a leaving present. The only thing now standing between you and freedom is your leaving do.

Office farewells used to be special occasions. In Fleet Street, for instance, there was a tradition of “banging out”, in which a retiring employee was walked out by colleagues through the presses, as the printers beat out a ceremonial slow-march with hammers. But nowadays, with the job-for-life having been replaced with the job-for-a-little-while, some of us would be lucky if colleagues raised a stapler in acknowledgment as we crawled out of the building with rentacrates and security guards in tow.

The brown-envelope whip-round has become as common as the printer jam, gift shops are overcrowded with leaving cards the size of Japan (to accommodate hundreds of straining-to-be-witty messages written at an angle), and every corner of every bar on every Friday night is occupied by a gaggle of suits and skirts saying farewell to someone whose name they can barely recall. I have attended four leaving dos for various people at various companies in the past fortnight alone. However, the greater frequency of these farewells does not make them any easier to deal with, if you are the one doing the leaving.

To some extent, the challenge of the leaving do is the challenge posed by every office party: the mixing of the personal and the professional; the combination of people with wildly differing views of what constitutes a good time; the dangerous presence of cheap alcohol. But what makes it unique is the profound sense of anti-climax – a special edition Portsmouth Football Club tankard does not feel like a fair exchange for your life, your sanity and your personality – combined with the violent clash between what the departing worker and the employer want from the occasion. For while every leaver secretly longs for an emotional farewell – pink champagne, the senior management in tears, a flypast by Concorde – it is imperative for any employer to demonstrate that the individual is dispensable.

Given this tension, it is no wonder that some people chicken out entirely. I once sat next to a man who, after more than 40 years’ service, not only refused the offer of a party, but didn’t allow anyone to even mention his departure on his last day. He just lolloped out of the door at 7pm, as usual.

However, I would advise against such an approach. Just as first impressions count, so do last ones, and the risk posed by slipping out quietly is that you will forever be remembered as that chubby guy who sat on the second floor between 1966 and 2006. Besides, it is important to mark your departure for the sake of those you leave behind. One of my favourite colleagues leaves today and I would have been genuinely bereft had she not marked it in some way.

As with so many difficult things in life, the key to surviving any leaving do is preparation. And the good news is that while each one is different – the tone dictated by a combination of factors ranging from the nature of the departure to your seniority – in many respects they are predictable. You are guaranteed to get a leaving card with a cover that features either a bear or a bunny waving goodbye demonically. It is certain that you will waste at least half the evening talking to someone you have never met before. And though the leaving do is the closest thing you get to a funeral in the workplace, the person making the speech will not, like your average vicar at your average burial, censor your deeds for the audience. It is likely they will pick up on your most humiliating moment and bang on about it mercilessly.

I was going to suggest that a key thing to remember throughout, right up to the moment you realise you have missed the last train and been left with the bar bill, is never to burn any bridges. But, on reflection, becoming over-emotional is more of a risk for a leaver than challenging the entire board of directors to a fist-fight. You may recognise the phenomenon from leaving school. You loathed the place. You wanted to smash in the faces of your teachers with a shovel. But when the moment came to leave, you found yourself crippled with nostalgia, thinking the old place had some good points after all, and weeping at the gates like a toddler.

This problem is even more acute at the office leaving do, where one’s nostalgia and amnesia is amplified by nice comments from colleagues and the consumption of no less than a litre of Shiraz and four flaming sambucas. Even the most bitter departee has to concentrate very hard indeed not to end up quoting Dr Seuss (“remember me and smile, for it’s better to forget than remember me and cry!”), breaking into a rendition of Jeff Buckley’s The Last Goodbye (“This is our last embrace. Must I dream and always see your face?”) or making a speech redolent of Tom Hanks’ in Philadelphia.

Which brings me to the highly emotional news that after eight years, I am taking a break from the Financial Times. However, there will be no leaving party. My route out of the building tonight will not be lined with 50 of the FT’s most attractive employees, all weeping softly into pink hankies. I am merely taking some time off to tackle a book project. This column returns in six months. Thanks for reading so far.