(This is not a “need answer fast” question.) 
Suppose that one of your employees goes missing and never shows up to work. (He or she has abruptly died in, let’s say, a car accident, but you, the boss, don’t know that - yet.) What is the standard procedure?
Does HR try to contact employee’s family, after the employee himself/herself can’t be contacted? Scour the news? Just list the employee as “no longer working here” after a while?
In the case of the company I work for, a coworker was ill a few years ago, never had a welfare call from HR in the three months she was off work, then, disgusted by their lack of concern, she quit by never coming back.
No follow up from HR to her contact-person ever occurred. As far as they know she may well be dead…
I draft employment policies for a living.
Pretty much every one of my clients has a “job abandonment” policy which essentially says that if you don’t report in after 3 days, you will be considered to have quit.
That’s a little different from my own situation, where I don’t have to check in with my employer, but at a certain point, if I just decided to stop going, I would miss a deadline, be called on the carpet, and then be terminated for missing that meeting, if not sooner.
This happened in a place I worked some years ago - a member of the team got ill and his attendance became patchy, then he didn’t show up for uork for a week. His manager tried calling him and he picked up, but was not very talkative.
They travelled to his home and knocked the door and called through the letterbox - they reported that they could hear activity indoors, but nobody would answer the doorbell.
In the end, the company sent him a letter saying that they would assume his resignation if they heard nothing back. They heard nothing back, so his employment was terminated.
A few months later, we were all called into the office and told that he had died and had been lying there dead for many weeks - it’s not clear whether he was still alive at the point the letter went out to him (we never found out if it had been lying unopened on his doormat or not).
I had a new employee who worked three days, then never showed up again. She hadn’t yet returned her paperwork (taxes, emergency contact, etc) so there was no way to contact her. Speculation was that the work was a bit too hard for her. She never picked up her pay for the three days she worked, so we used the money for a couple of pizza parties.
Not really what is being asked here but it reminded me of this incident.
The summer after high school I was working as a delivery man (boy?) for some company. The other guy suddenly quit and they arranged for a replacement referral from the unemployment agency.
A guy came out was hired on the spot and given the keys to the car out back. An hour later I went out and saw that the car was there but he was long gone. Obviously not paid for his 15 minutes of work.
The following Sunday we had a new youth leader in my church. Same guy! I asked what happened and he said he didn’t know how to drive a stick.
I guess he felt too embarrassed because he left partway through the service and never came back to church either.
Where I work we recently had a long-term, reliable employee not show up to work or call in for several days. The store director sent to police to do a welfare check and it turned out she had died, apparently while reading a book in her favorite chair.
Other people - new hires with bad attitudes - can stop coming in/calling and they’re just terminated under job abandonment rules and there’s no follow up.
So… different responses depending on length of employment and such.
I once worked at a place for several years and one morning fell ill. I remember calling work and leaving a message but either it didn’t go through or my boss missed it somehow or it was all a fever dream. He tried calling my phone but I was asleep. He then called my mom (emergency contact) concerned because I was otherwise very reliable, she called me and I happened to answer that time. Called work again and all was good.
A little surprising that they’d jump right to the emergency contact a few hours into the day but I guess it beats dying unknown in your chair.
I had a guy who worked for me who showed up for work on Monday, his first day, then called in sick Tuesday, worked Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, called in sick the next Monday, worked Tuesday and Wednesday, and then we never heard from him again. We called his contact numbers, sent mail to his last known address - no answer. We terminated him, but had nowhere to send his check.
A couple of weeks later his stepfather called me to see if I knew where he was. I didn’t (and I couldn’t have told him anything on the phone if we did). I have no idea what happened to him, and never found out. Alcohol? Depression? Kidnapped by space aliens? No idea.
Regards,
Shodan
My office would call around until contact was made in some form. I don’t know to what extent it’s company policy. In the event of a long term illness the company’s insurance group makes contact using nurses specifically tasked with welfare checks.
Back when I worked at the call center, a woman was going back to her hometown in Wisconsin to be maid of honor at her childhood friend’s wedding.
So the call center boss cancels her PTO request the evening after she finishes her shift and leaves for her vacation. While the woman is on the road to Wisconsin. Sends her an email telling her to be back at work the next day. :mad:
Then of course, since she was already there by the time she read it, she stayed and continued with the wedding. Got fired for ‘job abandonment’.
Pretty much everyone in the shop was pissed at the boss for doing something so low, but he wouldn’t give her back her job. She did get unemployment.
We have that kind of thing happen a lot - people just never seen again. With the vast majority of us being direct deposit for pay -------- you run out of unpaid days off, you are fired. HR does not follow up, no questions are asked, no one cares, and you are black-listed by the home offices in Seattle and you never work for them again. If your pay is by card, the money sits in limbo for however long the law says and then goes to the state until you claim it. Our HR is actually forbidden by the home office from contacting us to ask ------- damn near anything. “Don’t ask ANYTHING, don’t tell ANYTHING” is really the Golden Rule for them.
Don’t get me wrong - most just quit. No car accidents or deaths involved. But those happen as well. And it gets frustrating sometimes. You ask HR “whatever happened to Vanessa” and they just smile and say nothing. Not she quit, not she was fired, not a damn thing. They just disappear.
We had someone “disappeared” (as we call it) who was a casual friend of mine. I decided to track him down and found out the reason was he had had a minor stroke. I let our HR know and their response was nothing. I asked if I could make an announcement at stand-up and was told no. Company policy is strict; unless you “self-report” there is nothing they can say or are allowed to say. You just become one of the huge number of people “who use to work” for the company.
I’m having trouble finding it now, but I could swear that in Wisconsin, not showing up to work for three days in a row, without a reasonable excuse, constituted quitting, as far as unemployment was concerned. Assuming I’m at least partially correct about that, it’s probably where that rule comes from. What I am finding is that missing 2 days out of 120 without an excuse (barring an employee manual with different rules) is considered misconduct as far as the state is concerned.
We’ve had people disappear a few times. Usually on their first or second day. They’ll just leave on their break and never come back. What’s funny is that they’ll show back up 2 months later wondering why they never got a check. After figuring out who they are, I’ll say something like 'I don’t even know your last name or SSN or anything, you just left, how did you want me to pay you?“. They normally start spouting off all that info midway through the sentence. I’ll stop them and say 'remember that giant folder of paperwork I gave you when you got hired? All those forms that I spent a few minutes walking through with you and asked you to bring back to me? I told you you had to get them back to me before you could get paid?”…[nods]…“go fill them out, I can make you new ones, bring me your IDs that I showed you from that one page (the I-9) and once that’s squared away I can get you a check, but I can’t just hand you one now”.
At this point, a few of them will do it, most of them get annoyed and walk away if they realize that they worked about 4 hours and after taxes it’s not worth doing all that work for 20 or 30 dollars.
In extenuating circumstances, the boss has been known to just hand them the cash out of his pocket to be done with it. But that’s disappearing in the middle of a shift and stomping back in 2 months later won’t usually make that happen.
As for an established employee that stopped showing up. A few calls to them throughout the day and the next few days. Maybe some to their emergency contacts. If we know their local haunts, we’d probably stop there. Once we know that their still alive and well, that would be the end of it. I’d put in my notes that they’ve been ‘no call/no show’ for the last X days they’ve been on the schedule and all we’ve done to get in touch with them. On pay day I would leave their paycheck where I always do (employees pick them up). After about a week I would drop it in the mail and move on with life.
I see this somewhat because I work for a non profit and we help people get off public aid.
Some of my clients wind up back in jail or others have their creditors attach their wages (private or child support) so they just leave the job, rather than risk a trace and having their wages reattached.
No one seems to care from a company’s stand point. Any paycheck will be direct deposited or held by the company according to the laws of the state.
In my many years that I’ve run across this though, I’ve never heard of anyone dying or anything. It may have happened I haven’t heard that part of it though.
Years ago I had a very reliable employee who failed to show up for work 2 days in a row and was not responding to phone calls or emails. I called her emergency contact (her sister) who went over to her home and found her dead 
Not quite employment but similar: On my internal medicine rotation when I was a medical student the clerkship director specifically told us that I we didn’t show up to work he would assume that something bad had happened to us and call the police for a welfare check. Apparently he had a student some years back who didn’t show up one day (I don’t know whether they were sick or just lazy) and was very embarrassed when the police came knocking.
At my workplace, the three day no call/no show is considered job abandonment, according to the handbook.
In practical matters, if you have been here awhile and don’t call in one day, your boss will attempt to text/phone you. After three, a welfare check will be made. A case in point was me last month. One Friday, I didn’t show up on time or call in. When the locksmith finally got me into my (running) car two hours late, there were four texts from my boss and his boss asking if I was OK. In this day and age of mobile phones, if we don’t have access to our own, we have none of our phone contacts at our disposal.
One place I worked, one of the long term, most reliable employees, an older guy who did half the scheduling, and always cheerfully volunteered for the unpopular shifts, didn’t show up one day. Not just any day either, it was payday and we had to show up to collect it.
His phone appeared to be switched off, and when he still hadn’t called or appeared by the end of the day, the boss phoned in for a police welfare check.
They went round the house, and… nothing. He’d just had a few days off, and the flat looked like he hadn’t been there for them.
They tried to trace his (old banger) car, and found it parked up in a backstreet somewhere, nowhere near any of his known regular haunts. He was an older guy, and not in great health, so hospitals were called to see if any unidentified unconscious people/bodies had been brought in with his description. Nope, nothing.
It was about a week later, when the boss was trying to see if he could trace the missing guy’s adult son, on the basis of a possible name and that someone said he thought he lived in or near London, when the boss’s wife, filling in paperwork, noticed a slight discrepancy in the takings the guy had reported for the last week on one of his shifts (which was manning the gate in a car park)…
It eventually turned out that when he’d been doing the unpopular early morning car park shift for the past year, he’d been fiddling the books and pocketing part of the takings, completely unnoticed. When I quit the job a year later, the police welfare check had turned into a warrant, but they still hadn’t found him.
When I was working (for New York State) every employee had a contact number and an emergency contact number. That said, we didn’t verify these numbers or take steps to make sure they were kept up to date. So an employee could just disappear and we might not be able to call them.
The official policy was that if you didn’t show up for three working days without prior notice, you were considered to have quit your job by default. I can only recall one time when it actually happened - it was new employee who apparently decided he didn’t want the job but didn’t bother telling us. He just stopped coming to work.