A leaving do for somebody moving to a better job is a happy occasion that most workplaces conduct with the atmosphere of a mild bereavement.
Part of that is the format, which is inherited from retirements and does not fit. The rest is that nobody has decided what the event is for.
Match the tone to the reason
The single decision that makes a leaving do work, and it takes ten seconds to make.
Leaving for a better job. This is a promotion and it should feel like one. Congratulations, not commiserations. Somebody who has worked hard and got somewhere should not spend their last evening being told the place will fall apart without them.
Leaving for a change of direction. Curiosity is the right register. People are genuinely interested and mostly do not ask.
Leaving because they were unhappy. Tricky, and the answer is to let them set the tone. A small drink with the people they liked, if they want one. Nothing formal.
Leaving in difficult circumstances. Scale down and follow their lead entirely. A formal send-off imposed on somebody in a bad situation is about the organisation making itself feel better.
Most awkward leaving dos are a mismatch between one of these and the format used.
Practical things that decide whether it works
Hold it at a time everybody can come. A Friday evening excludes people with childcare, which is a specific and identifiable group and frequently includes the people who worked most closely with the person leaving. A lunch or an early finish includes almost everybody.
Keep it short. An hour and a half is plenty. Leaving dos that run long become an ordinary night out with an increasingly stranded guest of honour.
Do the speech early. Not at the end, when half the room has gone and the person leaving has been waiting all evening for it.
Two speeches, both short. One from a manager, one from somebody who actually worked with them. The second is the one people want.
Include remote colleagues properly, or acknowledge that you cannot. A video call held up to a noisy pub is worse than a separate five-minute call earlier in the day.
The card is doing the work
Worth recognising, because it changes what the gift needs to be.
The card that has gone round the office, with everybody writing something, is the emotional content of the whole occasion. It is the thing that gets kept, taken out years later, and remembered. The object beside it is secondary.
So encourage people to write something specific rather than "good luck". A sentence about a particular thing the person did is worth more than a page of generalities, which is the same principle that makes recognition land at all, discussed in employee recognition gift ideas.
Collecting money without annoying everybody
The gift is rarely the problem. The collection is.
One organiser, one message, one suggested amount. Repeated reminders are what generate resentment.
Silent opt-out. Not everybody can spare it and nobody wants to say so. A collection with a visible list of who contributed is a small act of coercion.
Say what it is for. People give more readily to something specific than to a pot.
Do not collect from people who barely knew them. It is a tax on being in the same building.
What to give
Something specific to them, not to the company. Branded merchandise as a leaving gift is a strange choice: it is a souvenir of a place they are leaving, carrying a logo, given to somebody about to work somewhere else.
Something for what comes next. If they are moving city, moving industry, taking time off, going travelling, the gift can point forwards.
Something practical they will actually use. Unromantic and reliably correct.
Something about the years they were here, if they were here a long time.
For a long tenure
Somebody leaving after ten or fifteen years is a different case, and it is the one where a commissioned piece makes sense.
They have an actual history: the projects, the office moves, the reorganisations, the colleagues who left years ago, the thing they are known for. That is material a generic gift cannot touch.
A short piece with the team painted in as characters, the projects as levels, and the running jokes as the content is a record of a working life rather than a memento of a job title. The tiers are £99 for a single level and £349 for a multi-level build with a cast, and the cast is the point, because the colleagues in it are what make it about the years rather than the role.
Two practical notes. Photographs of colleagues need individual agreement with an easy way to decline, and nobody should have to explain why. And keep it short, because it will be opened at the do with people watching, which is the constraint described in how to actually give someone a game.
Keep the content affectionate rather than pointed. A leaving gift that is a series of jokes at somebody's expense, opened publicly, is difficult to react to well.
Afterwards
The thing nobody does and everybody means to: stay in touch.
Most leaving-do promises evaporate within a month. If you actually want to, arrange something specific before they go rather than saying you will. A date beats an intention.
What this means
Match the tone to the reason they are leaving.
Do the speech early and keep it short.
Silent opt-out on the collection.
And write something specific in the card. That is the part they keep.
For a retirement rather than a move, retirement gift ideas for a colleague, and for the wider question of workplace recognition, employee recognition gift ideas.
