Your resignation may need approval from your replacement

A workflow design under review at several large employers would restructure offboarding around the entity that actually inherits the work. Under the draft, a departing employee's notice period would include a structured handover interview conducted not by a manager or a colleague but by the automated system that will be running the process afterwards.

The rationale is depressingly sound. Handover documents are written in the last week of a notice period by somebody who has already left emotionally, and are read by nobody until the first crisis. A system that asks specific questions, in sequence, until it can reproduce the work would capture more than any document, which is precisely what makes the proposal uncomfortable.

The interview would not be short. Internal estimates in the draft suggest that fully capturing a mid-level operational role would take between nine and fourteen hours, spread across a notice period, and that the process would surface an average of several dozen undocumented decisions that the employee had been making for years without noticing they were decisions.

“It would not be an interrogation,” a spokesperson for the design group would say. “It would be an interview. The distinction is that an interview ends when both parties are satisfied, and we are confident the employee will be satisfied eventually.”

The approval step is the part that would make headlines. Under the draft, the final sign-off on an employee's departure would not be granted until the inheriting system reported sufficient coverage of the role. In practice this would mean a resignation cannot complete until the software says it understands the job, a sentence that reads very differently depending on how the reader is employed.

Employment lawyers would dismantle this quickly, and correctly. Notice periods are statutory, resignation is a unilateral act, and no workflow can hold a person in a job because a completeness metric is at eighty-one per cent. The draft acknowledges this in a footnote and then proposes the sign-off anyway, which is a good summary of how such documents work.

What survives the legal objection is the interview itself, and that part is likely to happen. Organisations have wanted this for decades and have never had a tool patient enough to sit through it. They do now, and it will never be bored, never be tactful, and never stop asking why.