The farewell card isn’t for the person leaving. It’s for the people who stay
Picture this. It’s your colleague’s last day. There’s a brief shoutout in the team meeting, a Slack message with a few reactions and, then, they’re gone. In a parallel universe, another colleague leaves with a GroupTogether card signed by every person they’ve ever worked with – an outpouring of personal messages, memories and photos waiting in their inbox. Two exits. Two vastly different signals sent to the employees who stay.
Here’s what human resource leaders often overlook about the farewell: the person leaving isn’t the only audience. The team is, too. How an organisation treats people on their way out is one of the most visible demonstrations of its values. The other employees draw conclusions about what their own work is worth to the organisation they’re showing up for.
The problem is that pulling off a great farewell is never a quick job and hybrid work has made it worse. A physical greeting card usually spends three days on someone’s desk before anyone remembers it. The remote colleagues never get included. And there’s a frantic email at 4pm on someone’s last day, asking “has everyone signed the card??”
Co-Founders Ali Linz and Julie Tylman built GroupTogether to solve this problem. In 2015, the two Australian co-founders wanted a simpler way to bring people together around the moments that matter. Whether it’s a farewell card or a birthday surprise, GroupTogether makes creating group cards effortless – even when the team isn’t in the same room.
“Our goal from the beginning was to make celebrating any occasion gracious and meaningful for the recipient and effortless for the organiser. You can just come to GroupTogether, click start, and within minutes your entire team – wherever they’re based – has been invited to sign the card,” Tylman said.
By 2023, GroupTogether had expanded to the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada; it’s now trusted by more than 13,000 companies worldwide.
HR teams love how effortless and collaborative GroupTogether makes celebrating as a team. Cards allow unlimited messages, and anyone can sign – colleagues, managers, clients, even contacts outside the organisation – so there’s no awkward rationing of who gets to sign. There’s also no company subscription, no IT setup and no hidden upgrades.
For the recipient, opening a GroupTogether card feels like a moment. Their name appears embossed on a digital envelope right in their inbox. Inside, they’ll find messages, photos and GIFs from the whole team waiting for them. Card covers can be pulled from a curated library, or dreamed up on the spot with GroupTogether’s AI magic card cover tool, which generates unlimited unique designs from a simple prompt.
“We’ve had people email us saying they ugly cried at their desk reading their card,” Linz said. “That reaction tells you something. These aren’t just nice moments. They’re the moments when people genuinely feel appreciated. And the whole team sees that happening.”
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, Europe has the lowest employee engagement of any region in the world. Just 12% of European workers feel engaged at work; the vast majority (73%) are not engaged, and 15% are actively disengaged. That figure has barely shifted in over a decade.
One throughline in Gallup’s findings is the relationship between recognition and engagement. Employees are more engaged when they feel their work is genuinely valued. A well-executed farewell is one of the most tangible expressions of an organisation’s appreciation for its employees. A perfunctory one sends the opposite signal.
The paradox is that most organisations invest considerably in onboarding, with first impressions, structured induction programmes and welcome processes designed to make new starters feel valued from day one. Yet the same organisations often don’t give as much consideration to how people leave.
A new starter walks in as a blank slate. A departing colleague is someone the team knows, has worked alongside, has covered for and has laughed with. When that person is properly celebrated on their way out, the message to everyone remaining is clear: this organisation recognises what effort and loyalty look like. When they’re not, that message is equally clear.
Recognition is often discussed as a transaction between giver and recipient. But in a workplace context, it’s also a public act. When a team comes together to mark a colleague’s departure properly, everyone who contributed is also making a statement about the kind of organisation they belong to. When you’re flicking through forty messages on a farewell card, remote employees included alongside in-office ones, you get a strong sense of real connection.
“‘Do I matter here? Do people actually like me? Am I valued?’ They’re questions most of us carry around, whether we admit it or not,” says Linz. “That’s why a farewell card filled with messages or a birthday card signed by your whole team can mean so much. What looks like a small gesture is often something much deeper: reassurance that you’ve had an impact and that people care.”
That sense of connection has value well beyond the farewell itself. It reinforces something that no benefits package or town hall can manufacture: the feeling that this is a place where effort is noticed, where people are more than their job titles, and where the human stuff is taken seriously.
The farewell is one of the highest-visibility moments in an employee’s lifecycle – for the leaver, yes, but just as much for the team that remains. GroupTogether gives HR teams the simplest possible way to get it right: a group farewell card live in minutes, signed by everyone from the CEO to the colleague three time zones away, delivered with an experience that tells the recipient that this organisation takes its people seriously.
That’s a small investment. The signal it sends is anything but.
Learn more about GroupTogether
GroupTogether is the easiest way to create a group card online. Perfect for birthdays, work anniversaries, retirements, office farewells or babies. Loved by over 1 million users.
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