Why Two Weeks Notice Is Hurting Workplace Culture

0:09Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tapeaket marketing podcast. This is Jon Janssen. My guest today is Robert Glazer. He's the founder and chairman of the board of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency, and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor's Employees' Choice Awards, two years in a row. He's the author of the inspirational newsletter, Friday Forward, everybody should subscribe, and the number one Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and international bestselling author of five books. We're going to talk about his latest today, Rethinking Two Weeks Notice, Changing the Way Employees Leave Companies for the Better.

0:51So Robert, welcome back to the show. John, thanks for having me. So the enemy is two weeks notice, the standard practice of, hey, I got a better offer. I'm giving you my two weeks notice or the other way around. You're not working out here. You got two weeks notice. So that kind of deal. So why is that bad? There's two problems that we have. Well, I'm a big fan of psychology and cognitive dissonance. And so the left side of our brains knows that we're not in lifetime employment situation anymore. We don't have pensions, people are going to work forever. And yet when people then leave our organization, the right side of the brain, we treat it more like the end of a marriage than the end of a professional sports contract, like this huge betrayal or otherwise.

1:37So we're just not reconciling these two things. And it produces bad outcomes. You have employees who leave employers and their managers and their mentors with a bad taste in their mouth. Look, what they're told is by their parents, two weeks notice. That's what you do. It's respectful. But if you mentored someone for three years, you trusted them, you gave them a lot of rope, and they were out a little bit and had doctor's appointments and now they're leaving in two weeks. You don't realize... I mean, I get a lot of back channel references over the years. Everything is layout. You're going for a job, two jobs from now and someone reaches out and they're like, Yeah, John.

2:13I just remember how you left. And so endings really matter. If you're planning a conference, your last speaker is really important. It's everything that people remember. And then similarly for the company, particularly of a service business, clients hate account turnover. You're rushing to get a new person, all these things. So it just really is sub opt. It's just an outdated process. Most people just don't know what to replace it with. Right. Yeah. It's funny. I, you know, in marketing circles, I mean, I pay a lot of attention to testimonials and reviews and things like that. And it's amazing how really the perception that somebody has of the brand is not the brand, but rusty.

2:54Yeah. You know, the guy that fixed their boiler or whatever. Look, anyone listening to this, if you are either personally or professionally, whether it's accounting firm or your marketing agency, there is nothing that hurts the reputation more of a professional services firm than account turnover. It's the thing that puts it at risk. If you've ever been with a brand and you get three different managers in 12 months, you're like, I'm out. I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah. It was too much work to get in a rhythm. Yeah. All right. So I'm just going to jump right into your concept of what would replace it, the Open Transition Program, OTP.

3:28You got to love a good framework. So Robert, let's just go there. We're going to talk about bits of it, but maybe set the table. What is your theory about replacing two weeks notice? Yeah. So it's not just a theory because we've practiced it for over 10 years, but it is a theory, but it's also... And I've had a lot of other leaders just with little bits and pieces who wanted to be able to reach out. And look, we were building a great culture and just the two-week notice thing felt antithetical to that. So we tried this concept of a transition program that said, look, when you're ready to leave, we've created psychological safety.

4:03Come and have an open, honest conversation with us. We will never walk anyone out the door that day if they come and have it. And likewise, our managers are going to have honest conversations with you. And when we sense that something's not going right, we'll see if we can fix it. And most problems, if you actually get to them earlier, they don't become irrecoverable. If you wait long enough, then everyone's pissed and they can't get it. It almost doesn't even matter what the original problem was. Now you've got this whole vicious trust cycle and stuff going on. So we said, look, it's okay. We'll enter you into a transition program.

4:35And maybe that's 90 days, but you're working here and you're starting to interview and you're communicating with your boss about that. And maybe our HR team's helping you with your resume. And we want you to be a productive alumni member. When it's time to go, we want that to be a good outcome. And we'd rather we'd rather do that and have less surprises and pay you to work here, understanding, you know, we're going to get some diminished capacity than paying you severance or paying you to kind of not to work or go away and blowing the thing up at the end. Yeah, there's a couple of things you said there.

5:04I want to circle back to that idea that most problems are created by, because we just don't deal with them because we like, oh, I, you know, an employee gets fired, but I should have done that three months ago, you know, kind of, kind of thing. And so it just really deteriorates. So I think people have to realize that before they can start thinking about the open transition program, right? Right. Psychological safety is that... There's four components. Psychological safety, open communication, mutual respect, and commitment to mutually beneficial outcomes. Psychological safety is the foundation of this.

5:37With it, you can have some good outcomes. We're recording this in December. John, if I am firing you this week, because I'm at my wits end, or I was going to put you on a pip and you're with 10. What the issue was probably emerged in March. And if I had really... And it emerged as some performance problems. But this is the issue. This is like Western medicine versus Eastern. If three people have a headache and I give them a Tylenol, it might help the headache. But one is dehydrated, one's allergic to gluten, and one has a brain tumor. Tylenol is not a cure for that. So I talk in this book around digging to the root and there's 3 common roots.

6:16Problems the employee needs to fix, problems the employer can fix and wants to fix, and then problems that they're not going to fix. So I start noticing you're a little off in March. And instead of saying, John, you got to do better or whatever, I'm like, John, what's going on? And you confide in me because I'm your manager. And you might say one of 3 totally different things. One, you lost your childcare. And so you're really tired and distracted, or you're going through a separation. And so you're just not there. And so I was like, Like, look, John, this is... I can help with this. We can change your hours.

6:47But this is on you to fix. And generally, if you repair that problem, your satisfaction with the work and your performance is going to improve. The second one, you say, look, the last 3 people that we hired were at a higher level than me, higher salary. I'm doing the same work. I was promised a raise years ago. I'm just getting really frustrated. And if I look at that and say, geez, John's right. We overlooked him. I might say he's not. And that's a different discussion. He wants a man. But he's right. So we give him the promotion he deserves. He gets a new manager. And boom, it recovers. The third one, the one not going to fix, John comes and says, Look, I know you told me you're a remote-only company and I thought I wanted that.

7:26But I'm missing an office. And that leads to a discussion like, Hey, John, we're not getting offices. So why don't we help you find a better opportunity? So each of those circumstances might have showed up in a performance problem. But they have totally different routes and totally different solutions. and that's why this program can have a good outcome. If I lean in early and we're doing this transition in the third case in July, that's different because one of the common objections is like, you can't do this. People are toxic, all this stuff. I'm like, look, John's toxic in December because this has been going on for six months and now I'm pissed at him and he's pissed at me and otherwise.

8:04And the other objection, well, people will, they'll steal and they'll do this and people when they're leaving, all this stuff. And to that, I would say, if you have a lot of people that are constantly acting toxic and stealing stuff as they're on the way out of your company, either you are really doing a terrible job in hiring, or there's something about your culture that's making them that way. And either of those scenarios require a little bit of a deeper look. Yeah. And that's a real common idea behind the practice, right? It's like, well, once we decided to fire this person, we're like, take away their computer, get them out the door, right?

8:39Even before that, I think in the three months when you know you have to fire John and you don't, because John's a super nice and likable guy, but he's just not doing well, you start to distance him and push him away and sort of make him out to be a bad guy so that it makes it easier for you when you fire a bad guy. This would advocate the opposite. We talked about this, John, a few months ago. John, come into my office in July. John, I love you, but you know that you can't be a 50 % quota on our sales team for four quarters in a row. Like this isn't working. Like, do you want to be in sales? What do you want to do?

9:12Can we help you do something different? Right. Lean into the, you can lean into the relationship while holding the performance component there. But I think it's better to go that way than to, you know, your brain can't, this is cognitive distance 101. It can't handle that John's a good guy and a bad worker. So I have to make him a bad guy so that I feel better. Let's use Susie for our example. Yeah. So, you know, you're not the first person to say that. But the next example will be Susie. So you have a company that helps people create partnerships that are beneficial to their businesses. You've written books about that, which is a very common thing for an author to do, a business owner to do, to write a book that supports what they do, what their core mission is.

9:56you've written a couple, what I would call people ops books that probably on the, on the very, very surface, you know, don't seem like they would support your business objective. And yet here we are. So why, why is this topic? So are you so passionate about this topic? It's a great question. I think, yeah, we are a marketing agency, but we're also a services firm. And after 20 years of building a services firm, you can be interchangeable with a psychologist, It is every issue is a people issue. There's never a broken widget. There's never a broken press or a shipment that's late with FedEx. And so as a building organization, we were discovering I wanted to build this great culture.

10:38It required rethinking a lot of the practices I had seen. And as we kind of learned things and tested things, my purpose is to share ideas that help people and organizations grow. So I became kind of passionate about being a little bit of a laboratory. And if we found something that worked, try to share it with people or companies. Because to me, companies and great leadership are the solutions to our problems. If it's not clear to you in 2025 that government is not the solution to your problems these days, then to me, that's the biggest impact that we can all have. is that one great leader and one great organization spawns off a whole legion of great leaders and go off.

11:17A horrible leader and a horrible organization spawns off a whole group of traumatized people. So that's sort of the why behind that. So as I read the definition of open transition program, OTP, there's a lot of culture in it first. I mean, I don't think you wake up and go, oh, I read Robert's book and now we're going to do this, right? I mean, if there's not a culture of trust and there's not a culture of we want you to succeed, but what's best for you, I mean, how do you kind of start to change that in order to adopt this? Because I think a lot of companies could not physically adopt this. No, no.

11:55Actually, thank you for saying that because there's two disclaimers that I forgot to make. One is, do not read this book as an employee and go into a company with a horrible culture and say, hey, I'm thinking about leaving or whatever when they walk everyone to the door in hoods because this is not a bottoms up thing. This is a tops up thing. And as you said, if you have a, and I say it in the book, if you have a crappy culture and you have poor psychological safety, this probably isn't going to work. So it needs to be built on a foundation of that. I mean, the quickest way in an organization to really try to improve psychological safety, which is not easy, is vulnerability and feedback, right?

12:33Leaders are sharing more, they're vulnerable, they're real. And people see that feedback is welcome and taken and acted on. Those tend to be two of the main doors that open that up. But yeah, this is actually a program for good companies and good leaders. And I'm not saying like myself, but like myself, we're frustrated that the two-week thing just doesn't feel compatible with what they're trying to do, but no one knows any other way. So I've had people ask, like, look, if my company doesn't operate this, can I do this as my team leader? And I was like, look, there's nothing that would preclude you from having open and honest conversations, encouraging people to come.

13:15If you got to give HR notice, you can wait till four weeks and let them know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. While this is sort of a prescription for the end game, It's actually a bit of a roadmap for how to not have as many end games, isn't it? Yeah. You don't... Look, we even talk to people about this when they join. So they feel like if I happen to make a mistake, it's not going to be a disaster. People are going to leave, right? And it could be two years and it could be great or it could be four years. The key is just how do they not leave poorly? And how do you turn that into what McKinsey has mastered?

13:58And I think what we've had a lot of success with is alumni. Your alumni at some point might be more than the number of employees you have. And they can either be net promoters and net distractors. Our alumni, like McKinsey consultants who go in-house at companies and hire McKinsey, they go in-house at large brands. And they tend to hire us back to help with that. But that only works if they left on a good note. So there's a real long game to be played. We live in the real-time checking and glass door and review world. And everyone knows about scorched earth these days. Actually, people know more about it of the company that scorches earth rather than the candidate.

14:38I'm waiting for someone to build the inverse of glass door. But it's all interconnected. And your brand's kind of live out there. And if you can turn something that's a negative into a positive, we put all this work into hiring well and culture and we've just totally ignored leaving yeah yeah yeah which is sort of the ultimate expression of of culture isn't it yeah how you treat someone out the door probably otherwise the door probably said when you have nothing to gain from them it's the same thing how do you you know you enter i know a lot of people interview and they always try to get into a meal and try to see how they treat the help or the server how do they treat people that you know So they're not trying to impress because they tend to show their true stripes.

15:23Since you've been doing this for a while, and I assume, do you actually consult with other companies to do this? You know, I haven't. I've done some workshops, so I do more speaking on the topic. But other than the... This is actually like... I had a lot of people reach out just from the TED Talk and the HBR article and tell me... I went and decided to try to have one of these real conversations. It was so much better. But they didn't have sort of the playbook. So this is the first time the sort of playbook has hit the market. You know, yeah. If there are companies that need help with it, I'm happy to talk to them about it.

15:57To me, it's sort of perfect workshop. Yeah. You know, kind of material. But again, I think the hard part is you got to come with the right frame of mind. This is not going to fix the wrong frame of mind, is it? No, you have to have the right company and the right people. And there has to be a level of frustration. and understand that the behavior of the employees will focus, will inherently go around what they see. There was a company I talked about in the book years ago that had won these cultures award and talked about their culture, super proud of their cultures. When I asked them how people left their company, they said, well, people give notice.

16:32And then we ask them to leave that same day because there's a lot of risk. So they kind of march everyone out that same day with a box. And then if you think that anyone else is going to give you more than... Again, you're worried about people stealing. They're not going to steal at 10 a.m. on the day that they give notice. They're going to do it the months beforehand because they see and they know that you're going to throw them out that day. So it is just this classic devil you don't know versus devil you know. Have you determined any sort of metrics, employee morale, productivity? I know this is in some ways just sort of a tweak to your culture anyway.

17:10It's not a giant pivot. So have you been able to determine? in it. I can tell you it's probably saved us just selfishly outside of the... Look, it's actually created... I can... A couple of things. It's also allowed for boomerang employees because they leave well. A lot of employees would like to come back, but I think they're even embarrassed based on how the end went. Or they gave two weeks notice and they don't want to call. They assume everyone hates them. So we've had a couple of our best employees be boomerang employees. So I think that's a great effort of it. And then also just client retention.

17:47I know that there are clients we would have lost. I know that, again, how this plays out in a services firm. So if Tracy... We'll pick on Tracy now. Tracy gives two weeks notice and is my account manager on an account for maybe my PR firm. So she comes on the weekly call and she says, Hey, Bob, I'm going to leave in two weeks. And there's going to be a replacement. I don't know who it is yet, but they'll reach out to you. I'm going to be pissed. But let's say Tracy's on a transition program. And so then they decide... So they find out about this. Two weeks later, they do some account shuffling and they bring in John.

18:25And John starts listening on the first week's call, then leading in on week three and four, and then building the rapport. And then by week eight or nine, Tracy says, Hey, Bob, actually, John's going to be taking over from here. And now I know John. I'm already comfortable with John. You just assuage this whole account turnover problem. Yeah, we actually do that even in a sales environment. A lot of times people contact us because they've read one of my books or something. And if I'm the one that's having a meeting with them or I'm the one that starts, they want John. And so we've done that all along.

18:58It's like, no, you get the team. Here they are. They're here on day one before you become a client. So that kind of leads me to, I don't know if this is that kind of out there, but because you're in a services business every now and then, a client needs two weeks notice. Right? Either you want to fire them or they want to fire you. Could some of this apply to a better outcome when you're going to disengage with a client? Yeah. I mean, ideally, anyone would want time. Similar, we had some clients who... This goes a little to professional sports. You've got people hitting their free agency period.

19:34Right. Right. You know they're not resigning. They're not dogging it. But they're playing out their current contract knowing that they're not going to renew the contract. And I just think that if we could take a... Well, sometimes they have their best year. Yeah. Usually they have their best year. Thank you, Scott Boras. And this is just, I think, where we could emulate a little more and take this a little less personally. People are not going to work at your company forever. We're just not. If they're under 30, you talk to people under 30, they think two years is a good term. Like that's like, Hey, I did my two years.

20:10It was great. Like, let's move on. And so that's, that's the reality. And, and, and we just need to update our software for, for, for the version that we're running. I've always kind of made a joke about the term when people talk about best practices, I'm like, well, there aren't any better practices. Like, shouldn't we try to do better practices as opposed to just what everybody does? That's funny. We always say at our company that We have a process for everything. And if you don't know how to do it and you don't have time or whatever, follow the existing process. But the goal is to upgrade all the existing processes.

20:42The difference is we want you to upgrade it for everyone, just not for yourself, right? Upgrade the software, upgrade the app. If you found a better way, do it and share it, right? We want to be delivering a consistent service, but we don't want it to just be consistently outdated. Yeah. Well, Robert, it's always great to visit with you. You are... not only obviously building a strong culture at your own organization, you're really contributing so much to the thinking on around the topic, even as a marketing company here. Most people think marketers are just cold blooded money grabbers, right?

21:21That's salespeople. That's true. So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where can people find out more about your work and obviously more about rethinking two weeks notice and that workshop that's surely soon to be coming. You can download the book anywhere that books are sold or audio books are sold. You can also go to robertglazerglazer.com. That's where all of my books, podcast, newsletter, everything is on there. If you click on the Friday Forward newsletter, you'll then see a tab for rethinking two weeks notice. I have the book up on my sub stack and you can download the first, you can read the first three chapters totally free and see if it's see if it's something that grabs you and you'll get plenty of information even from those first three chapters.

22:04Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you soon out there on the road. John, thanks for having me again.