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What to write when a colleague is leaving.
Farewells come with less notice than retirements and more awkwardness. Here is what to write for someone you worked beside daily, someone you barely knew, and the situations where the usual lines do not fit.
Published
A leaving message is harder to write than a retirement one, and the reasons are structural. You usually get four days rather than four weeks. The person is not finishing a career, they are moving to a similar job somewhere else, so the grand register does not fit. And a good proportion of departures are not entirely happy, which the standard phrases ignore completely.
Say what changes now they are going
Retirement messages look backwards over a whole career. Farewell messages work better pointed at the present: name the specific thing that will be different next week. It is easier to write, it is more obviously true, and it does not require you to summarise a person you have known for eighteen months.
Someone you worked with closely
Daily colleagues
“The thing I’ll miss is being able to turn round and ask you whether an idea is stupid before I take it to anyone else. That saved me more times than you know.”
“You are the reason I stopped dreading Monday planning. I don’t think you were trying to do that, which somehow makes it better.”
“Working next to you taught me that you can be completely direct and still be kind. I had assumed you had to pick one.”
“I have copied your habit of writing the summary first and I am never going back. Half our team does it now and they think it is mine.”
“You covered for me during a fortnight I would rather forget and never once made it a thing. I have not forgotten it.”
“Whoever they hire will be perfectly good at the job. They will not be the person who notices when I have gone quiet.”
“You made me better at this by disagreeing with me properly. Nobody else has bothered.”
Someone you liked but barely worked with
This is the most common case and the one every list of farewell messages skips. You have overlapped for a year, exchanged perhaps forty sentences, and you genuinely thought well of them. The instinct is to write something warm and general, which reads as filler.
Write the small specific thing instead. Being remembered for something minor by someone you hardly knew is disproportionately affecting, precisely because it is evidence you were paying attention when you had no reason to.
When you did not really work together
“We only overlapped on one project, but you were the first person here who explained something to me without making me feel slow.”
“I don’t think we ever had a proper conversation, but you were reliably the one person in that meeting who said the awkward thing out loud. It helped more than you’d think.”
“You have been the friendliest person on this floor for two years and I wanted to say so before you left.”
“Every handover I have ever had from you has been complete. That is rarer than it should be, and I noticed every time.”
“I asked you one question about the reporting system in March and you sent me a diagram. I still use it.”
Someone more junior, or someone more senior
Someone who joined after you
“You arrived and immediately asked why we did things a certain way. Two of those questions changed how the team works.”
“Watching you learn this job in eight months has made me reconsider how long I thought it took.”
“You have been better at asking for help than anyone I have worked with, and it has made everyone around you better at offering it.”
A manager or someone senior
“You gave me work I was not ready for and then made sure I did not drown in it. That is the whole of what I needed from a manager.”
“You told me no clearly and early, every time, instead of letting things drift. I did not appreciate how valuable that was until I worked for someone who did not.”
“You defended a decision of mine in a room I was not in, and someone told me afterwards. I have thought about it a lot.”
“The standard you set for how people here talk to each other held for four years. I hope it holds after you.”
When the leaving is not a happy one
Redundancy, a restructure, a departure everyone knows was not voluntary. The usual vocabulary — exciting next chapter, onwards and upwards — is actively unkind here, because it asks the person to perform enthusiasm about something that happened to them.
- Do not congratulate them. There is nothing to congratulate.
- Do not speculate about what comes next, or tell them it will work out. You do not know, and they are tired of hearing it.
- Do say what they did well, in the past tense, with specifics. Their work was real regardless of how it ended.
- Do offer something concrete if you mean it — a reference, an introduction, a name. Vague offers of help create an obligation to ask.
A departure that was not their choice
“This is a bad decision by this company and I wanted to say so plainly. The work you did on the migration is still the best thing this team has shipped.”
“I am sorry about how this happened. For what it is worth, you are the person I would call first if I were building a team.”
“Happy to be a reference, and I mean an actual one with a phone call, not a line on a form. Ask me any time.”
Someone you did not get on with
You are not obliged to write anything. If you are going to, do not fake warmth — everyone can tell, and it is more insulting than silence. Find one thing that was genuinely true and say only that. A short, honest, specific line about their work is entirely respectable and nobody reads it as cold.
Honest without pretending
“We did not always agree, but you were never once careless with the work. Good luck.”
“You held a line on quality that I found inconvenient more than once and were usually right about it.”
The phrases to skip
- “Good luck in your next adventure.” It is on every card and means nothing.
- “Don’t be a stranger.” Both of you know how this goes.
- “You’ll be missed.” Passive, and it avoids saying by whom or why.
- “It’s been a pleasure working with you.” True, probably, and completely interchangeable.
- Anything about how they are lucky to be escaping. It is a joke about your own situation, not a message to them.
If you are collecting these for the team
Farewells give you about a week, which is enough. Send the ask the day the news becomes public, while it is still the thing everyone is talking about — waiting until you have a plan costs you the only days when the request writes itself.
Ask one question rather than requesting a signature, and include one example so people can see the register you mean. Then close it the afternoon before their last day, not on it.
Common questions
- What do you write to a colleague you did not know well?
- Something small and specific rather than something warm and general. Being remembered for a minor thing by someone who had no particular reason to notice is disproportionately affecting — it is evidence you were paying attention.
- What should you write when someone is made redundant?
- Not congratulations, and nothing about exciting new chapters. Say what they did well, in the past tense, with specifics, and offer something concrete if you mean it — a reference with an actual phone call attached, or an introduction to a named person.
- Do I have to write something for a colleague I did not get on with?
- No. If you do, do not fake warmth, because it reads worse than silence. One honest specific line about their work is entirely respectable.
- How much notice do you need to collect farewell messages?
- About a week is enough, and short deadlines tend to raise response rates rather than lower them. Send the ask the day the news becomes public, while it is still what everyone is talking about.