If an employee leaves your company there may be actions required on your ESOP. Check your plan rules for specific clauses related to leaving. There may be different clauses depending on whether the employee is a 'good leaver' or a 'bad leaver'.

In order to make changes to your ESOP you will need to be logged into Orchestra as a company administrator.

Go to 'ESOP & Options' in your left hand menu, then click on 'Manage pool'.

A common setup for options when an employee ('good leaver') leaves the company is that unvested options are lapsed (surrendered) on their departure date, and vested options have a set time frame in which to be exercised. If the vested options aren't exercised in the specified time frame then they expire and are returned to the pool for reallocation.

Under 'Actions' click the 3 vertical dots icon and select 'Lapse (employee exit)'.

Enter an option holder departure date. This halts further vesting and unvested options are lapsed after this date and returned to the option pool for reallocation.

Vested options will be held by the option holder until expiry (which may be 'never'). If you want to adjust how long the vested options are held for then enter a new expiry date to override the existing expiry. For example, a company may give a departing employee three months in which to exercise their options before they expire.

After this date the vested options are lapsed and returned to the option pool for reallocation. Toggle off any grants that you would not like to lapse.

If your employee is using their work email on their option holder, and they will lose access to this email address when they depart, then you can enter a personal email address for them. They will automatically be sent an email invitation to set up a new login so they can continue to view their options after leaving the company.

Click on the 'Lapse options' button to save your settings. Further vesting will not occur on grants that have been set to lapse. The vesting schedules are halted.

When the expiry date passes any options that aren't exercised will expire and are automatically returned to the option pool for reallocation.

If the employee notifies you to exercise their options, and pays the exercise price, here's how to exercise the options.

If you have lapsed options then vesting schedules have halted automatically. If you're not ready to lapse yet then you can halt vesting in the interim. Perhaps the option holder is only leaving the company temporarily (for example taking leave without pay).

Under 'Actions' click the 3 vertical dots icon and select 'Halt vesting'.

Tick the boxes to the right of the grants that have vesting that you would like to halt, or click 'Select all' to tick all boxes. Click on 'Halt vesting' to complete.

Vesting schedules that have been stopped will show the 'Halted' tag. No further vesting of the halted schedules will occur.

Individual vesting schedules can also be halted using the vesting schedule 'Edit' button.

Tick 'Halt this vesting schedule?' at the bottom of the form. Click 'Confirm'.

An employee may have departed your company temporarily (eg. they went on maternity leave or a sabbatical) and you halted their option vesting schedules. When they return to work you might want to start up their option vesting again. We don't recommend restarting a halted vesting schedule, as it will try to catch up, by vesting the missed options at the next vesting date.

Leave the halted vesting schedules, and enter a new vesting schedule with new vesting parameters to start vesting the remaining options.

If an employee departed and you didn't halt vesting in time and an extra vesting event has processed that you would like to remove, you can delete it. Click on the trash bin icon next to the event.

Click 'Continue'.

If you would like us to review the vesting schedules you have created, please contact us.