Sometimes they come back

The title may sound like a title to a horror movie but this is with regards to employees who left you and then comes back to work for you. Never happened to you? It has happened to my small legal firm  a few times. 3 times actually. Twice were when the employee really quit by tendering their resignation. Once was when this girl had to go back to her hometown to care for her mother who was sick and might not came back to work for us. She did come back after 4 months of  sabbatical. The others went off to their various new jobs but then one day we get a call or a visit from them asking us whether us whether we would want to take them back. As our firm is always expanding, we took them back but not all of them last. One have resigned and we actually wanted to get rid of her but she quit before we needed to.

Does this tantamount to taking back your words or in Malay sayings, like licking back your spit (gross right?, but it is a saying). I mean, usually, when an employee left you, there will always be at least a negotiation between you and him or her as you will want to have her at his or her position which you have train her for so long. Training and developing an employee is one of the expensive and necessary investment a company have to do. You sent them to seminars, train them yourself on how to do a particular job, tell them some confidential information and gave them access to various area of the office. We basically taught them the whole nine yard on how to be good at that particular position.

In my case, we have a legal management system which we had bought from an IT vendor which nearly everyone had gone for training for. It is supposed to revolutionise how we do our work. We could keep track of all the dateline and the templates which we can install in the system will ensure there will be less mistake on documents especially those which we need to file with various authorities. This system need to be taught and learned by any newbie who come into our firm as it is a system which is already accepted by everyone. We spent quite a lot on it and expected everyone to come up to speed at least 2 months after they joined us. So, when any one of the employee who is already trained for it resign, just imagine the backlog that would happen. That is why we usually agree to these returning employee, grateful even, although it is akin to lowering your standard a bit.

In my own opinion, it is nothing wrong to take back good employee. You already know them as someone who can do the job and they would already know on how to handle the things that you give them to be responsibility on. Although I have a few disgruntle employees, which is a norm in any organisation, I think I rarely be not fair to all their needs as long as they themselves understand and support our business. As long as they are there for us, we are there for them too. When the going got rough, we try to have a heart to heart talk with them without compromising our business, which is the first thing that everyone, either us or them, to be able to sustain the weather.