Every place I’ve worked it’s the responsibility of the manager to know why an employee isn’t at work. So… If you don’t show up, your boss tries to contact you, and if that fails, she tries to reach your emergency contact.
I can think of two cases where a person didn’t show up without letting their boss know. One was a young man who was generally very reliable, and his boss was extremely worried when she couldn’t reach him. (He was Indonesian and, it turned out, had no local emergency contact.) She was right. At three in the afternoon the Indonesian embassy called her to say he’d died in an auto accident.
The other was a very senior guy who gradually got less and less reliable, and eventually failed to show up for a month without any particular reason. He was fired. We all wondered why it took SO long to fire him. There was no official story due to medical confidentiality, but it was widely rumored that he was an alcoholic and that had caused good absence. Good riddance, he was a horrible person before his problems started.
I had a work friend named Mike. He was a sweet, funny guy about 20 years older than my friend Melinda and I, and we used to teasingly call him uncle Mike, which amused him. One day he was late to work. We didn’t really think much of it - if he called in sick we wouldn’t have necessarily been told.
It gets to be around ten and Melinda and I and a couple of the other supervisors are called aside and told that they just found out why Mike was late - he’d had a massive heart attack while driving, lost consciousness, and hit a tractor trailer truck head on.
I felt so bad, not only for Mike, not only for that poor truck driver, but also for Mike’s daughter. She was barely out of college and had already lost her mother to suicide two years earlier.
I haven’t had subordinates for a while, but I would definitely be anxious if they were a couple hours late without an email/call/text.
