When “That Person No Longer Works Here

April 21, 2014 by Linda Koco

Did you ever email or phone a person you’ve dealt with at an insur­ance com­pany or major sales outlet only to learn the person no longer works there?

Sometimes — actu­ally, too many times — the only indi­ca­tion that the person has left the com­pany is the bounced email or the phone call rerouting that goes nowhere. The out­side caller or email-sender is left with ques­tions — What hap­pened? Did Jon or Suzanne leave or die? Who do I con­tact now? — and uneasy feelings.

For sure, if the now-missing person has retired or left the com­pany for “per­sonal rea­sons,” that news some­times makes it into the media, espe­cially if the work­place is a highly vis­ible com­pany. A listing on a social media net­work might pro­vide some clues, too. And, if death is the cause, the obit­uary page of the local paper might carry the news.

But those are excep­tions, not the rule. It sure is frus­trating, espe­cially if the out­side caller/emailer has reached out for busi­ness rea­sons. If the need is urgent, the time and effort the person must expend to get some help goes beyond being annoying. It becomes aggra­vating, and depending on the out­come, it might make the out­sider wonder if serious prob­lems are afoot at the firm.

Imagine the wel­come sur­prise, then, when MassMutual issued an announce­ment this week about senior man­age­ment team changes at its Retirement Services Division. The state­ment not only announced the hiring of sev­eral new exec­u­tives; it also included news of the depar­ture of two other exec­u­tives, giving their names and where they’re heading next.

In addi­tion, the announce­ment quoted a top level exec­u­tive who thanked the departing exec­u­tives for their lead­er­ship, vision and team­work. She also expressed appre­ci­a­tion for their con­tri­bu­tions, and said the com­pany wishes them well in their new endeavors and looks for­ward to “lasting rela­tion­ships in their new capacities.”

Nicely done, MassMutual. This is cor­dial, pos­i­tive, and busi­nesslike. It injects a sense of con­ti­nuity without going over­board on detail.

That’s not always pos­sible, of course. Some employees leave a com­pany due to mass lay­offs or because they were fired or entan­gled in “bad blood” dis­putes. Some just relo­cated to another branch. Some are coping with dif­fi­cult per­sonal issues and don’t want any atten­tion drawn to them­selves or their depar­ture. Some may have sev­er­ance pack­ages that include binding non-disclosure pro­vi­sions. Privacy poli­cies, human resource poli­cies, state laws and a myriad of other fac­tors can influ­ence this.

But even when those very under­stand­able rea­sons are at work, firms should still be able to help out­side callers/emailers learn what they need to know to resolve their busi­ness ques­tions with a min­imum of hassle when an employee leaves.

A couple of sug­ges­tions come to mind: 1) Provide a clear path for han­dling incoming emails and calls that arrive for a worker who has left; and 2) Let existing staff know exactly what to say when out­siders fish around for reasons.

Larger car­riers seem to have a drill-down on this but not so the mid-sized and smaller firms and agen­cies. Fortunately, there are plenty of expert resources avail­able on the Web and in person that can pro­vide ideas and assis­tance. Addressing this is one more hassle to deal with when a worker leaves, but if dead-end calls or emails stir up a harmful round of com­plaints or rumors, that hassle will be the least of the firm’s problems.

Originally Posted at InsuranceNewsNet Blog on April 21, 2014 by Linda Koco.