Email confirming that I will be leaving at some point taken as immediate notice

[Scott B]

Hello,

I have told my employer that I have been offered another job and will probably be leaving in mid July, however do not wish to hand my notice in straight away until everything is confirmed 100%. Today I emailed HR to find out how many holiday days that I have available to take as "I will be leaving the business in mid July".

In hindsight sending this email was a stupid thing to do as an hour later a senior manager called me in to say that as I've said that I will be leaving this is taken as me handing my notice in with immediate effect and I am now due for my last day to be Monday 30th June (1 week from today which is my minimum notice period). I was then asked to send another email confirming that I am handing my notice in as of today and will be leaving after the week has been served (Which I haven't done).

Other than being a terrible way to treat an employee who has been totally honest with them I think this is more than likely illegal.

However, there is an issue that I am more worried about. I have been with the company for only 9 months and we do have certain targets (KPI's) of which I am hitting some but not all. If I know this company as well as I think I do then I'm pretty confident that they are thinking about ways to sack me straight away rather than putting up with a clearly disgruntled employee for the next 1-3 weeks, I'm also pretty confident that they will be able to find the ammunition required if they want to do this. The issue here is that I wont be starting the new job until 14th July and have bills to pay which is going to be very hard to do if they were to sack me tomorrow.

So I'm wondering what the best route here is, I could:

A) Take it on the chin and send an email saying that I am handing my notice in as of today which I would guess would satisfy them that they don't need to find a reason to sack me and mean that I would be out of work for 1 week and 4 days rather than a possible 2 weeks and 4 days.

B) Send an email saying that I believe that their has been some confusion and that this was not meant to be a notification of me handing my notice in with immediate effect.

C) ???

Any advice is much appreciated.

Many thanks,

Scott

[Harmonica]

Re: Email confirming that I will be leaving at some point taken as immediate notice

At this stage I can't see the harm in sending an email simply stating that there has been some confusion. You were merely attempting to keep your employer informed and not immediately handing in your notice.

[Scott B]

Re: Email confirming that I will be leaving at some point taken as immediate notice

Hi Harmonica,

Thanks for your reply, I guess that is the sensible thing to do, I'll do that first thing in the morning.

I guess from there the ball is in their court. I'm wondering though that if they do choose to sack me for not hitting all of my KPI's would I not have any legal leg to stand on even if nobody else is hitting all of their KPI's either?

Thanks again,

Scott

[MissFM]

Re: Email confirming that I will be leaving at some point taken as immediate notice

I don't think you have any legal legs with such a short history of employment unfortunately

Harmonica is right, there is absolutely no harm in sending that message.. good luck

[Scott B]

Re: Email confirming that I will be leaving at some point taken as immediate notice

I guess that the only thing going for me is that if they do choose to sack me they will look bad in front of all their staff.

I'll send that email in the morning and see how it goes, many thanks for your help