How to protect your budget, your brand, and your employees when exits go global
Michael Scott fired an employee on Christmas in The Office and it played as a joke. In real life, Erin Goodey (fearless Director of People Services at Oyster HR) would never have let that happen
She has a firm rule: no terminations before Christmas unless someone has committed gross misconduct. We're talking about the kind of gross that means someone has done something genuinely serious, like theft, physical violence, harassment, a real health and safety breach. Not “made the office cringe” gross.
No Friday terminations, either. "No one deserves to suffer 48 hours to just sit and dwell and feel upset," she says.
Making these calls compassionately is the easy part. Navigating the process correctly… well, that’s harder.
What's harder is figuring out how to terminate someone in a country with an entirely different set of rules. Think of "let someone go" as less of a decision and more of a process with a timeline you didn't budget for.
The harder ones—like terminations in the Netherlands, Poland, France, Japan, Italy—require a whole different level of preparation. This is what that preparation actually looks like.
Key Takeaways:
- Terminating abroad? The fastest path usually costs the most.
- Being compliant and handling this well are not the same thing.
- How you terminate someone defines your employer brand more than how you hire.
Why your HR playbook doesn’t travel
US-based HR leaders typically enter a cross-border termination with three things: a severance budget, a timeline, and a loose plan. What they almost never have is an accurate picture of how badly that plan can misfire.
You might assume employment rules travel with your company. (They don't.)
Most HR leaders default to rules they know: at-will employment in the US, or the two-year unfair dismissal threshold in the UK (which, for the record, is expected to change soon). Some assume those rules are the baseline, and that the rest of the world operates somewhere in that range.
Well, it doesn't. And holding up a US or UK lens on a French or Polish employment situation doesn't show you the picture more clearly. It just shows you the wrong picture.
In the Netherlands, an employee who goes on sick leave cannot be terminated for the duration of that leave, up to 2 full years. Full stop.
We've seen what happens when a company applies its local lens to a globally distributed team. Someone kicks off a restructure process with comms that seemed perfectly standard at HQ, with reasonable language and routine framing, but read very differently in another jurisdiction. In Poland, even the suggestion of a restructure can be enough.
(And no, the law does not care how urgently your CFO needs this done. Like their labor code, Poland is not messing around.)
What looked like a simple communication became a costly miscalculation: team members on protected leave, severance exposure climbing, and negotiations that were never supposed to be that complicated
In Poland, that one-month severance budget is about to cost six.
The Netherlands has its own version of this. A mutual termination agreement (MTA) started in mid-April can often close by the end of June. The alternative is to go through their employee insurance agency,the UWV, aka Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen (say that three times fast!),with a formal government approval process that stretches to August or September at minimum, often October or November. Meanwhile, tenure keeps accruing. So does the severance entitlement. Mess any of this up, and your tidy timeline turns into a nightmare of back and forth negotiations and months with limited progress.
France, Germany, and Italy are three of the most complex EU jurisdictions to exit from. Strong worker protections, mandatory consultation requirements, and severance obligations that tend to be higher than anyone budgeted for. None of that means don't hire there. It means don't assume your exit plan is simpler than your entry.
In football (or soccer, depending where you are) terms: the referee hasn't sent you off just yet, but he is writing something down and he does *not *look happy.
The unspoken rule: if something feels straightforward in a heavily regulated country, assume it isn't.
The case for doing nothing first
Erin's team operates on a single principle: moving fast doesn’t mean getting it right. The best outcome is actually the least damaging path forward. Getting there requires understanding why a termination is happening before touching how.
This sounds obvious, but trust us when we say, it rarely happens. CFO directives create urgency and managers want it done. But HR leaders get caught in the middle, between internal pressure to move quickly and the legal reality that speed usually costs more.
Erin's answer? Slow down and get specific.
How Oyster turns a cross-border termination into a clean exit
Step 1: Establish the "why" before anything else.
Before you do anything termination-related, ask yourself: Is this a performance issue? A restructure? A conduct matter? Your answer will determine which legal frameworks apply, which documentation is required, and which paths are actually available.
"Once we've understood why...if termination is the ultimate decision, and that's all we're going to be focused on, that's fine. Let's then talk about the strategy." - Erin Goodey
A performance case, a redundancy, and a conduct matter each carry entirely different legal requirements—and in some countries, entirely different timelines and costs.
Step 2: Map country-specific risk before setting a budget.
For each jurisdiction in scope, assess:
- suspension rights
- consultation requirements
- minimum severance expectations
- what "fairness in practice" looks like versus what the law says on paper.
Erin's team works from recent cases (and says “ciao!” to depending on just legal theory). "We managed a really similar case to this last week," she would tell customers. "Here's what we learned."
A checklist can never replicate local knowledge, expertise, and practical guidance shaped by similar cases. It's the difference between a June close and a November one.
Step 3: Build the conversation, not the checklist.
A termination call is not a compliance exercise with a human attached. Erin’s team of HR business partners provides speaking notes to HR leaders breaking the bad news. This is (most likely) going to be the worst call this person receives this week, this month, probably this year, so the framing is critical.
"Did they feel like you treated them with respect? That you were truthful, that you were open, and that you listened?" - Erin Goodey
She once spent considerable energy convincing a CEO not to open a termination call with the phrase "I'm dropping the hammer on you."
(Like, why?!?!)
Step 4: Measure success by what didn't happen.
The work that matters most here won't show up in your reporting. No KPI tracks "termination handled with enough care that the employee felt supported.” No dashboard captures what didn’t happen either: the lawsuit that was never filed, the Glassdoor review that was never written, or a reference that quietly tanks a future hire. You know it went well because nothing happened—and "nothing happened" is genuinely hard to earn.
But what she can tell you about is the HRBP who delivered a termination so well that the employee thanked him at the end of the call—and then, weeks later, referred their new employer to Oyster as a customer.
"The absence of a crisis is often the real win, and that will never show up on a dashboard." - Erin Goodey
From worst call to best outcome
Companies that bring in expert guidance before acting can avoid the severance multiplication effect: a one-month budget that becomes six in Poland, or a June termination that doesn't conclude until November in the Netherlands. They can avoid the heightened risk and drawn-out negotiations that come from moving without a full picture. You know, the kind that turns a clean exit into a months-long dispute nobody planned to have? And we can’t forget about curbing the legal exposure from termination routes that were never going to succeed in that jurisdiction.
They also avoid permanently damaging the employee's view of their company. "An employee's experience is not defined by their onboarding," Erin says. "It's defined by their offboarding."
It's a hard thing to build a company culture around, because most of the visible signals point the other way. Erin says to think of onboarding as the “proposal” or “engagement period.” Everyone is excited. Everything is bright and shiny. There’s a shower of welcome messages on Slack and someone ordered a swag box. But offboarding has a call that everyone dreads making.
The HRBP’s referral story is the clearest proof. But behind it is a simpler point: the way a company treats someone on the worst day of their professional year says more about that company than any benefits package or values statement.
It's worth getting right.
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