Garden leave

What garden leave achieves

The person stays employed, so duties of loyalty and confidentiality keep operating, they age out of live customer relationships and current information, and they cannot start with a competitor while the leave runs. That combination is often more enforceable in practice than a bare non-compete, which is exactly why senior contracts pair long notice periods with express garden leave clauses: the notice period becomes the restraint, and it is a paid, defensible one.

The legal footing

Garden leave is contractual practice, not statute. The safest position in most jurisdictions is an express clause, because some roles carry a "right to work" argument (people whose skills or profile depend on actually working) that makes an implied right to sideline them contestable. During the leave, full pay and contractual benefits continue, accruals continue, and the employee generally cannot take another job without consent, all of which should be stated rather than assumed.

Using it proportionately

Garden leave costs the full package with zero output, so it is worth deploying where the risk justifies it: senior exits to competitors, roles with live pipeline or pricing knowledge, unhappy departures where presence does more harm than absence. For most exits, a managed handover beats an expensive absence. The design questions: how long, whether partial (working notice then garden for the tail), and how the person's departure is communicated while they are technically still employed.