The period between quitting and leaving a job can be a strain for all involved, writes Josh Jennings.
In the ideal world, all relationships between employers and employees would end amicably. But herein is the real-world problem: by the time employees hand in their resignation many of them are jack of the job, says Gary Pinchen, the owner of workplace and discrimination representatives A Whole New Approach.
On the other side of the coin, employers aren't known for wiping their hands of staff members who are racking up too many consecutive employee of the month awards, either.
None of this bodes well for the notice period. According to the director of management consulting group Sacher Associates, Monty Sacher, the difficulty associated with said period is inevitable.
"In some companies, when you leave you threaten everybody who stays and they take it personally," Sacher says. "Though it's not personal, sometimes people feel like they identify with their company and you're rejecting them along with their company.
"It's hard; I don't think there's much employees can do other than lie low and do what they have to do and move."
The executive director of the Australian Institute of Employment Rights (AIER), Lisa Heap, says when employees resign employers' concerns often concern security, intellectual property and the disappointment of losing valued members of the organisation. In Heap's experience, many employers are prone to respond to the situation poorly.
"They feel let down if they don't want the person to go and they sometimes act a little heavy-handed in what they do," she says.
The employer's role is to consider what interests the organisation has at the same time as adhering to the employee's rights to fair treatment, Heap says.
"Organisations don't talk in detail to the resigned employee, so they don't necessarily ask the employee straightaway what the arrangements are around when they're going and how they're going to go," she says. "They don't entertain a discussion about not going - which they might want to do if it's a valuable employee.
"And they don't necessarily make adequate arrangements around that person going."
The managing director of McIlroy IR Group, Gwen McIlroy, says employees play their part in complicating the notice period.
"We're probably talking more blue collar here than the professional level but if an employee's given a month's notice, there's a definite school of thought around paying them out their notice period and letting them go at the point they give their notice rather than continuing to employ them," she says.
"Some of the things that can go wrong with the employee, even though you're paying them for that month, is they're not motivated; they're not focused on the job at hand," she says. "If they're disgruntled they may choose to sabotage something at the workplace, whether it be computer equipment or documentation that's stored, or whatever the case may be."
Paying an employee out is an easier option in some instances than others, however.
Some companies might want employees to honour notice periods if the employee has rare specialist knowledge that's needed to see out a project. Or the employee might be compelled to stick out a notice period (resentfully or otherwise) for the sake of references or contacts.
But in those instances when commitment to notice periods is most critical, how difficult is it to align the interests of employer and employee? Notice periods must be "reasonable" under the Fair Work Act but determining what's reasonable in some circumstances is another matter.
"If you were to bring the Fair Work Act up on your screen and put in a name-search for reasonableness, it must come up about 250 times in the legislation because it's all about what's deemed to be reasonable but who says what's reasonable?" McIlroy says. "Employers fall foul of it all the time."
Employers can outsource the drafting of contracts to get things right but there's nothing to stop them from sourcing a shonky contract either, McIlroy says.
"You could probably download a contract off the internet for $50 and get absolutely what you pay for," she says.
"The terms and conditions in that contract may not necessarily be binding on all the parties because they don't meet the fundamental requirements of contract law."