Secondment: lending somebody to another team or company

A secondment is a temporary move: somebody works for another team, department or organisation while remaining employed by you. It is used to fill a gap, develop a person, or support a client — and it goes wrong most often not during the placement but at the end, because nobody wrote down what returning means.

What a secondment agreement must settle

• Who remains the employer, and therefore who pays salary, holds the contract and handles grievances.
• Who directs the day-to-day work, which is the host and is a different thing from employment.
• Duration, with a stated end date rather than an open arrangement that quietly becomes permanent.
• What happens to pay, benefits, pension and holiday — unchanged unless agreed, and agreed explicitly if not.
• Who is liable for what the person does, and whose insurance responds.
• Confidentiality and intellectual property, particularly on an external secondment where the host gains access to both parties' information.
• How either side can end it early, and with what notice.

The employment risks worth naming

An external secondment that runs long and looks like ordinary employment with the host can create exactly that impression legally, particularly where the host directs the work, provides the equipment and integrates the person fully. Separately, in some jurisdictions a secondment that ends with the work transferring can engage transfer regulations. Neither is a reason to avoid secondments; both are reasons to keep the arrangement visibly temporary, with a date, and documented as a secondment rather than drifting into something neither party chose.

Agree the return before the placement starts. The role somebody comes back to is the single most contested part of any secondment, and the honest version says what happens if their old job no longer exists — because after twelve months it frequently does not.

Running it so it works for everybody

1. Set objectives with both the home and host managers, since the two usually want different things.
2. Keep a scheduled contact point with the home organisation, or the person becomes invisible to the people who decide their future.
3. Include them in home-side reviews and pay rounds rather than deferring them until return.
4. Review at the midpoint, which is when an extension or an early end is still practical.
5. Debrief on return and use what they learned, or the development argument for the whole exercise was decorative.
6. Record it in their file with dates, because it is evidence of capability that otherwise disappears.

Ettex Records keeps the agreement, the dates and the review points together, which matters because a secondment is one of the few arrangements with an end date that nobody owns. Whoever manages the return should be named in the same record as the person who signed it off.