Question:

I was recently made redundant. I was upset, and in the meeting the HR person said I could leave immediately, ignoring my redundancy notice period. They offered to collect my personal belongings and drop them off to me in the downstairs area. Despite telling this person several times that I wanted to pick them up myself, they went ahead with this and one of my belongings went missing. Should I have called the police?

Answer:

I read your email and the second thing that crossed my mind (after what an awful experience that would have been for you) was one of those films set in an anodyne office critiquing corporate culture in mid-1990s America. There’s something so cold, unnecessary and authoritarian about denying a terminated employee’s simple request to collect their own things.

But there’s also something pathetic about it. It’s a desperate attempt to retain control and dignity, but it’s laughably futile – ridiculous even. The gap between what corporate culture or convention considers sensible and what the general public do is sometimes vast, and this seems to me like one of those instances. The fact that one of your belongings went missing just makes the whole thing so much more lamentable.

I asked Sarah McCann-Bartlett, the CEO of the Australian Human Resources Institute, what might have been behind the company’s decision to treat you like this. Her response was much more measured than mine, but it did have one thing in common to mine: American movies.

“There are times when it may be best for both the employee and employer for the employee to depart on the day of the final redundancy notice. As one would expect, some people have a very strong reaction to this news, and it could be distressing for them to stay at work. Others may feel an urgent need to focus on next steps very quickly and some could even be disruptive to their colleagues if they stayed. In these scenarios, it would be sensible for HR to agree to this outcome.

“This means the practical aspects of offboarding an employee, including recovering company property such as laptops, keys, access passes, systems access and credit cards, and the employee retrieving their belongings, all have to be managed much more quickly.”

McCann-Bartlett said organisations handle such matters in different ways.