Welcome to the Community

You clearly understand the issues.
I would be pushing back at what can be done to make employment with you more attractive, especially to good performers.

I'd simply contract with new starters on a two-month notice period, and ensure that references note factually where anyone leaves a post in breach of their notice period. Unless you have a job change/promotion where you could attach a longer notice period as part of the renegotiation, I wouldn't advocate trying to increase everyone's notice period otherwise. Feels like far too much pain for the gain.

You don't say why you have so many leavers but fundamentaly, people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. Those managers who think the solution lies in trying force people to stay longer in roles they don't want to be in shows they lack a basic understanding of people management. This may well be a factor in why you have so many leavers in the first place.

It’s not something we have discussed and if we did I wouldn’t support it.

It’s the wrong solution in my opinion for the challenges faced.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

Hi i am facing the same request to increase notice to three months and wondering how you got on? Thanks Denise

In reply to Denise:

The issue is there is little you can do to enforce it.

I worked in recruitment for 27 years - mainly perm IT and some people like IT managers in small firms would often be on 3 mth notices. They would simple tell the company as they handed in the their notice that they were leaving on x date (usually a month) but would be available for the rest of their notice period by phone/email in case of issue.

There is very very little a company can do to enforce a notice period that does not cause more issues than it solves

What are your thoughts

My thoughts are that, in addition to their other knowledge gaps, your managers don't understand how notice periods work. Frankly, I would consider a business that tried to push through on this to be one heading in very dark direction and would be looking to leave myself (possibly with abbreviated notice, just to make a point).

are HR departments sticking to this norm or seeing the same request?

Actually, our trend has been towards shorter notice periods. A lot of senior staff contracts have reduced notice periods from 6 to 3 months, and other staff from 3 to 1 month. This is due to anticipating that there may be increasing cases of isolated redundancies over the next few years, in which long notice periods are just a financial liability.

what is happening in practice?

It's not at all uncommon to find misunderstandings about notice periods among both employees and managers. I've had the "but how will you stop them leaving?" conversation a lot of times over the last couple of years (and, outside my professional employment, the "you know they can't stop you from just leaving, right?" conversation with friends and acquaintances). But when I *have* had the conversation, it's invariably been a short one in which the lightbulb goes off and managers realize that notice periods aren't any kind of useful tool for the vast majority of employees.

In reply to Robey:

Some years ago I was "instructed" to impose 6 month notice periods on all our senior management team. I made similar arguments to those presented in this thread and also pointed out that, should we ever wish to negotiate a settled departure, we had just doubled the starting point. I consulted with each individual separately (and answering their questions honestly) and managed to achieve acceptance from all of them. However, the first new appointment we made with this clause gave their notice in a few months later - and the same person who had instructed me to implement the increase decided that we did not need the leaver to work their 6 months.....Rather surprisingly since then we have not had too much pushback or refusal to give 6 months, but equally we've found that even 6 months notice does not mean a full and effective handover....