I turned in my resignation a few weeks back, and I'm on my last week of work…but the way its moving is not what the resignation period is for.
We have a stupidly long 4 week notice period in our contract, even for staff who have only worked for a year, unassumingly because its hard to fill my position because its quite senior and requires quite a lot of knowledge in a specific field.
He had a bit of a whinge when I turned it in, but nothing major. But then I just went back to things as though I never turned in my resignation at all. I've literally only got 3.5 days left at work, and my replacement isn't starting until tomorrow…in a different office to me. So I'm going to have 2 days to handover and instruct him on over 80+ active projects in two days, while the poor guy is still learning how our complicated booking system and file management practices work.
All the while I'm still taking on new projects that don't see completion for months yet, so I'm literally sending out an email with a list of questions to a client that is going to respond in a few days and get my “This email is no longer active” message.
And the icing on the cake is the boss is going on a week long holiday the Monday after I finish!
The notice period for resignation is a courtesy. It's a notice to allow you to start shifting projects and workloads to new people, its a time for hiring and instructing replacements.
If I had known it was just going to be 3.5 weeks of absolutely no change, followed by two days of frantic buck passing, I would have just turned in my resignation and taken annual leave instead of wasting my time making headaches for my replacement!
Its so frustrating because pre covid it was a really good workplace. But we lost a lot of staff in covid and the boss has done nothing to rehire them, even though post covid our work volume is even higher than pre covid. Its like he saw the massive bump in profits he was getting from lots of work but half the salaries to pay and was trying to ride it as long as he could by just saying “we're trying to find people, just hang in there, soon enough”
Soon enough turned into 6 months of constant stress and overwork with no new hires in sight. The last straw for me was when both me and the other executive forced a meeting to tell him we cant keep this pace up anymore and we're completely burnt out, only for him to basically hand-wave us away saying “I've got a real estate friend who's moving to town next month, maybe I'll ask her if she wants the job”…the highly technical, not related in anyway to real estate, job.
Frustrates me to no end because i tried to do everything the right way. Wrote a very positive resignation letter, offered to work the full 4 weeks instead of taking the time of with my annual leave (though the payout will be quite nice,) even planned out documents to train my replacement…and he just sat on his hands and did nothing with the time I gave him. No doubt when the handover period is shit and the new guy is completely lost and overwhelmed because no one took the time to train him and dumped him in the middle of 80 projects that he needs to lead with no idea on what they are, I'll be blamed…somehow.