The Grellwick and District Employers' Association has confirmed that farewell drinks for eleven staff made redundant last month will be held only after each of them has published a post about the experience on a professional networking site.

The posts must follow a template supplied by the association. It opens with the sentence "I want to share some difficult news," and closes with "This is not an ending but a beginning." Required sections include "What this chapter taught me," "The leader I want to become," and a numbered list of at least three transferable lessons drawn from being let go.

Drinks for the group had originally been scheduled for a Friday evening at the Anchor and Pulley. They are now being held in what the association calls a responsive format.

The requirement

The association's general secretary, Mr Tobias Vetch, said the policy had grown out of observed best practice. "Every departure we've seen recently has come with a post," he said. "A beautiful post. Reflections on resilience. A carousel. We simply asked ourselves why we were letting people leave without one."

Mr Vetch said the posts benefit the departing staff above all. "The job market today runs on visibility," he said. "An unpaid lesson about vulnerability is worth more to these people than two weeks of severance. We looked at the numbers and two weeks of severance is what they got."

One of the eleven, a former accounts coordinator who asked to be named as Mrs Doreen Hapley, said she had drafted the post four times. "The template wants me to say redundancy gave me space to reconnect with my purpose," she said. "I have a mortgage and a garden I never liked. I wrote the post. It's doing quite well. I'm thirsty."

Another, Mr Cedric Blane, has posted nine times about his layoff, adding one lesson per day. He is now up to lesson forty-one, including "Silence is also a message" and "My cat has watched me grow." The association has confirmed that his drinks qualify.

What happens next

The association says posts falling short of 500 reactions within six months will trigger a review, at which point the former employee may be asked to post about the review. A follow-up post about the experience of writing the first post is also under consideration for next year's leavers.

Mr Vetch rejected the suggestion that the policy makes departure conditional on public performance. "Everything is public now," he said. "We're just the ones holding the lager."

The Anchor and Pulley has confirmed it will keep the room booked.