Employees Leaving Without Notice After Payday: What Actions Can We Take?

Handling Employee Departures Without Notice

Employees are leaving the job without any information or notice period. They leave the job after the salary has been deposited. What action can we take? Can we stop their PF amount, or what else can we do?

Regards

Dear industrialpower, Please examine why this is happening. You might discover some startling and revealing facts about your organization. Salary is paid for the work done as per attendance and is not conditional upon whether the employee continues in the employment or not. There are two different issues here.

Stopping PF withdrawal is illegal. It cannot be attached even by courts, whether it is a civil or criminal case.

Warm regards.

When there is a no-show for an employee, please consider the following:

1. Stop payment of the PF and salary immediately.
2. Communicate with the employee through phone and letters in three steps until the termination letter is issued. Mention the pending release and clearance for the employee.
3. Additionally, in case the employee requests release documents, mention in your letters that their release from the organization will be pending until clearance is completed. The clearance process includes obtaining departmental leader's clearance, signing off on knowledge-transfer documents, and buying out the notice period. Only when all these processes are completed by the employee will they receive their release documents.

Please do revert in case you have further queries.

Regards,
Cite Contribution

Dear Industrial Power,

As Mr. Rajkumar suggested, try to find out the cause for such sudden exits. In my opinion, this generally happens when the employee is not relieved from service even if he is willing to pay for the balance notice period.

When employees join, they read the terms and conditions of employment and take up employment. But when it comes to leaving, they do not express their contractual obligation to the prospective employer and disregard the notice period to the current employer. This trend is rampant in the industry and can be curbed only if employers insist on proper relieving letters from the past employer.

In some instances, employees abscond from employment without proper handover, resulting in utter chaos.

I presume that by deposition of salary, you mean pay equivalent to the notice period.

You will be required to remit the PF contribution up to his period of service with your company. You cannot withhold it.

One way of minimizing this problem is HR must talk to the department head of the respective department, seek a plan of action for relieving the employee, and then recommend appropriate action to the management.

This will build trust with the employees.

Regards,
M.V. KANNAN