Saying Goodbye

Today marks the start of my last week at my current job. After almost exactly 6 years of working for this company, it feels a bit bittersweet to be saying goodbye.

At this point, most of my loose ends are wrapped up. I have exit interviews scheduled for Thursday afternoon and will not be returning to work on Friday due to out-of-office meetings.

So it would be appropriate for me to send out a “goodbye” email to the employees within the next couple days. Which gets me to thinking, what on earth am I going to say?

I certainly can’t tell the truth! Talk about burning bridges, if I unleashed the bitterness of my feelings on losing my job it would be like shooting a missile at bridge and obliterating it! In my imagination, my farewell email calls out those people who have wronged me and brings to light a bunch of dirty secrets I’ve been sitting on for years. There are lots of stories about people who do just this, including this one.

The email is entirely inappropriate. However, it also has a lot of really great points (cough, cough).

Anyways, my desire to “Keep it Classy” means that I’m stuck writing a polite and non-inflammatory email to my co-workers.

For anyone else who needs to write this type of email, here are some tips:

• Keep your message short and sweet. If you’re losing your job and not leaving on your own accord to go to another company, don’t bother going into details. There is really no way to keep it nice when referring to a lay off, so take my advice and avoid it altogether.

• Say something nice about your co-workers. Even if you hate them all and hope they go down in a fiery blaze, pretend that you like them. Mention projects you worked on or events you enjoyed together. Say something simple like “I’ve enjoyed my time with [company] and have appreciated the opportunity to work with you.”

• Give them some way to contact you. If you don’t want everyone to have your personal email address, that’s fine. However, I think it’s a great idea to include your LinkedIn account and encourage them to connect with you. I also plan on including my Facebook account link, so that interested people can ‘friend’ me if they’d like.

Depending on the size of your company, it is up to you whether you decide to send the email to everyone, or just those who you are close to. In my case, I’m going to pick and choose my recipients and then keep the “To” list as a BCC.

Here’s my email that’s going out on Tuesday:

Hi everyone –

You may have already heard the news, but I wanted to take a moment to let you know that this is my last week here at [company].

I have enjoyed the last 6 years here and appreciate having had the opportunity to work with each of you. Thank you for your support over the years and I wish you all well in your future endeavors.

Please keep in contact, by connecting with me on LinkedIn here:
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=26067821&trk=tab_pro

You can also “friend me” on my Facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/julie.dellinger

Thank you all,

Julie

Short.
Sweet.
To the point.

Now that’s keeping it classy.

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