Laid off. Should I contact clients from on-going projects?

Question

I was working with a client for the past year on a site. I was let go from my company.

I don't like the idea of just disappearing. I'd like to contact the client and tell them I've left, and that it was good working them, etc.

Answer 1

No. They were not "your" clients, but rather clients of your former employer. Let your former employer make contact with them and explain who will be handling their projects/accounts going forward.

Attempting to contact those clients yourself, if your former employer got wind of it, could be construed as you attempting to steal business from your former employer or use that connection to get a job with them which might violate a contract or other agreement you signed. A bit far-fetched, but some people can get really litigious these days.

If those clients contact you afterward, just tell them it was a pleasure working with them and you're disappointed that you're no longer working with them.

Answer 2

In my view, you don't only have a business connection with people you've worked with, you have a personal connection with them as well. It's natural that you want to say goodbye to people you've worked with for a year.

There are two things to look out for:

• Let your employer inform them first, so that they can tell the client who will be taking up your work, who is their new contact, that sort of thing. It may be that you are the one who gets to inform them anyway, but let your employer decide.

• Don't actively try to steal the client. Besides possible restrictions in contracts, it's not really the ethical thing to do.

Other than that, I don't see a problem.

(other people say that culture may matter here, I am in the Netherlands)

Answer 3

If the situation is that you have an end of employment date set up ahead of time but you're expected to keep working in the meantime, THEN it could be a breach of contract to reveal that you're being laid off. So definitely don't say anything in that case.

So that's the part of my answer that's new, below is the rest of my answer in the form of rebuttals to existing answers.

"No. They were not "your" clients, but rather clients of your former employer."

The company I work for exclusively does contract work for other companies. The way that our contracts work, we are employees of the company where our offices are (the company I would casually say I work for), but also legally employees of the clients whose projects we work on. So, in a very real and LEGAL sense, my clients are my clients. We have no way of knowing the legal circumstances of the OP's situation, so the above assertion is baseless.

"Attempting to contact those clients yourself, if your former employer got wind of it, could be construed as you attempting to steal business from your former employer or use that connection to get a job with them which might violate a contract or other agreement you signed."

I work in the US, so of course this may be different where you are, but here any such non-compete clauses are generally a joke. They have never held up in court. The legal basis for this is that once you are laid off or quit, you are no longer under contract with that employer. And no matter how your employer tries to construe the language of your work contract, one of the most fundamental aspects of contract law is that any involved party can back out of the contract at any time. Your former employer can claim that the contract covers say, a one year period after you leave the company, during which time you can't work for their competitors. You of course can then say, "Well I'm backing out of the contract now, so too bad for you."

"Don't actively try to steal the client. Besides possible restrictions in contracts, it's not really the ethical thing to do."

Since I've already covered the contract aspect, let's look at the ethical concerns. You and that company were engaged in a mutually beneficial working relationship. That relationship has ended. Your former employer is not a human being with whom you are still friends. Ethically speaking you own your former employer NOTHING, just as they owe you nothing after you leave.

I don't like that people keep using the word "steal" here, as that is literally not applicable. The client isn't a small physical object you can sneakily slip into your pocket and walk away with. It is literally not possible to steal one of your former employer's clients. What you CAN potentially do is engage that client in a risk/reward discussion with regards to hiring/contracting you to work for their company. But that is no different from any other person trying to get a job. That's just how the process works.

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*edit: "The only thing this doesn't cover is burning your bridges. It could be a very real disadvantage to piss off your former employer or coworkers." – Tim Seguine

I feel like Tim raised a good point in so far as I should have addressed this. I'd like to try to do that now, but I've been finding it difficult to express what feels very self-evident to me. So first let me re-iterate what I said before that you DEFINITELY should NOT reveal to your client that you're being laid off before your company does. You're still under contract and most likely there's privacy clauses, and it would just be asking for trouble. But assuming you wait until after your company makes the announcement, and assuming that you will wait until after you've left the company to make your good byes IF the situation plays out that way... then I couldn't come up with any plausible scenario where you're burning any bridges or pissing people off.

So as much as I'd like to cover this "issue" it seems unrealistic to me. It may just be the combination of the country I live in and the industry in which I work. Maybe non-compete clauses are a big deal where you live. Maybe your company has a long dark history of suing former employees for "violating" non-competes. If you know that to be a fact, then I guess you have to decide for yourself how you feel about that.

But let me paint a picture for you one last time. Your company is laying you off. However, the word "company" is just a label we use identify a group of people working together under some government charter, blah blah blah. The point is that there were actual people involved in the decision to lay you off. Your direct supervisor, plus probably your supervisor's manager, plus a couple of HR reps, plus who knows who else. Unless your company is very small, there was a whole chain people involved in making this decision. Those people are the ones who might be pissed off if you were to go work directly for their client. Do you think that THEY were concerned that laying you off was "burning bridges"? Those people got together and decided that the best decision for their organization as a whole, was to kick you out of it. Are you really going to concern yourself with how those people feel about YOUR CAREER after you leave?

Answer 4

I will assume that you are still in your notice period. If that's not the case, you really shouldn't write such an email.

But if you are still working for the company, it's perfectly fine to send such an email as long as you atleast include a sentense with helpfull information about how the relationship between them and your company will be in the future (like introducing your replacement, giving his contact information, saying that your email adress will be dead in a week, etc.), because this will make the email a business matter.

Writing a 100% personal farewell letter is indeed (as others already said) somewhat a no-go. Also you will want to use your business email for sending that message. Sending it from a private email would really be a no-go again.

If you want to be sure, you could simply ask your manager if you are allowed to write such an email. Of course in that discussion with your manager you will want to highlight the fact, that it's in a strong interest of your company that the clients are informed about what's going on, because that's the professional way.

Answer 5

Legally, you'd probably need to check your contract.

Ethically, no... to a point.

This actually recently happened to my father.

He joined a pretty large well known company about 25 years ago. When he joined the contracts in place didn't have any clauses about taking clients upon leave. He worked there for ~25 years and when they decided to get rid of him they finally asked him to sign a new contract regarding this (he wasn't obligated to sign). Since he joined the new contracts had clauses added about that type of thing, but he was still bound by the one he signed decades before.

According to him, a lot of his clients just wanted him to do the work for them, and weren't interested in other people at the company doing the same work. I think in the end he came to an arrangement with the company that he would only take a select number of clients, and probably got a payout for doing so.