Lex: Gardening leave | FT

Lex: Gardening leave - How to get paid to do nothing is a central question of the human condition. It has taken the ingenuity of the world's leading investment bankers to produce an answer: gardening leave. [Financial Times - Financial Services]

.....Compared to traditional retention techniques.....gardening leave may be cheap. The individual does get a salary in spite of being inactive, but......Isolation disrupts their client relationships while the new employer wastes time.

Yet if everyone has gardening leave, it confers no relative advantage. Assuming banks have similar employee churn rates, aggregate costs stay flat, while productivity falls.....