How to hand over work when someone resigns suddenly

Run a short handover in priority order so live commitments and access are transferred first and the documentation you can afford gets written second.

The notice is short and the list is long

Somebody who holds a lot of knowledge has resigned and you have a fortnight at best. Three clients deal only with them. Two systems are configured under their login. Nobody else knows which vendor renewal falls due next month. The instinct is to ask them to document everything and that wastes the time you have.

A short handover is a triage exercise rather than a knowledge transfer exercise. You will not capture what somebody learned over three years in ten working days. You can protect the commitments that would embarrass you and the access that would lock you out and the relationships that would walk out with them.

What this costs and what you cannot buy back

You cannot buy back the knowledge. Some of it leaves however well the fortnight is run and pretending otherwise produces a plan that fails everywhere instead of succeeding where it matters. Decide early what you are prepared to lose.

The costs land on the people who stay. Whoever absorbs the work carries two jobs for a period and their own deliverables slip. That slippage needs to be acknowledged openly rather than discovered later. Add recruitment effort and the ramp time of a replacement and any external cover you bring in where a professional service fee attracts GST at 18%.

There is a contractual layer as well. Notice periods and final settlement and the return of company property are governed by the employment terms you issued and by applicable law and the detail varies by state and by the nature of the role. A qualified professional should confirm your obligations and theirs before you make commitments in either direction.

What not to attempt

Do not ask for a complete process manual. A leaving employee asked to document an entire role produces a long document written under pressure and it is reliably the least useful artefact of the handover. Ask for narrow documents on the two or three processes only they can run.

Do not backfill the role before you have looked at it. A sudden vacancy is one of the few honest opportunities to ask whether the work should exist in its current shape. Some of it will turn out to be reporting nobody reads and some belongs with a different function. Hiring an identical replacement in week one locks in a structure you had not examined.

And do not attempt a handover meeting with the whole team present. Transfer happens between named individuals who will own specific things. A group briefing produces shared awareness and zero accountability and the first failure after departure will find nobody responsible.

The sequence that works

Start with access and not with knowledge. Inventory every system the person can reach and every account registered in their name and every credential only they hold. Domain registrars and payment gateways and analytics properties and social accounts and the mobile number receiving one-time passwords all belong on that list. Transfer ownership while they are still willing because recovering an account registered to a former employee is slow and badly timed.

Then triage commitments by deadline and reversibility. Anything with a date in the next sixty days and anything a client is expecting goes first. Each item gets one named owner and a short written note of status and next action. Do not rank by how interesting the work is.

Then handle relationships personally. Every client or vendor who deals mainly with the leaver should hear from you and their new contact together before the departure rather than afterwards. Finally spend whatever hours remain on recorded walkthroughs of the two processes nobody else can run. Recording while they work costs them nothing extra and captures the small steps a written procedure always omits.

How to judge whether the handover held

Documents produced is the flattering measure. A folder of handover notes proves somebody typed and says nothing about whether the work continues. Hours of meetings held flatters in the same way.

Count the things that break in the sixty days after departure and whether each one was on your triage list. A failure you anticipated and ranked low is a decision. A failure nobody had considered is a gap in the inventory and that is the lesson worth keeping for the next departure. Also track how long the remaining team carries the extra load because a handover that quietly becomes permanent causes the second resignation.

The common mistake

The expensive error is spending the notice period on documentation and leaving access until the last day. The person departs on good terms and a month later you need to update a DNS record or dispute a charge on an account that answers only to an address nobody can open. Recovering a domain or a payment account without the registered contact takes weeks and the day-one access inventory avoids it entirely.

The second error is treating the exit as a grievance. Both sides benefit from completing a handover well and a leaver who feels punished does the contractual minimum. Keep the reference and the settlement separate from how much they help. The fortnight of goodwill is worth more than any clause and it is the only thing that gets you the undocumented detail you did not know to ask about.

This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.