Absence reporting

[BerryPieandCustard]

I have an issue and would like some outside perspective please. I am the assistant manager in this situation.

Busy school kitchen, manager is off on Fridays leaving the assistant manager in charge, you are a catering assistant.

You are due in for work at 6:10am. It is your responsibility to open up, take in a delivery that is required for the day and cook breakfast for 15 on site boarding pupils and 30-40 other pupils.

At 12:50 AM you send a text to the assistant manager telling them you are at the emergency vet and will not be at work. You receive no response as it is 12:50AM. Assistant manager wakes at 6:45 and attends work ASAP to provide some kind of food for pupils.

9am another staff member arrived at work who happens to live next door to absent staff member. She gave a lift to the emergency vet, stayed there and gave a lift home not arriving home until 3 am. Absent persons husband was apparently off work today so could have attended the vets?

Text message sent requesting attendance at work was ignored plus one call from assistant managers mobile. Call to landline one a with held number was answered and request to attend work was made. Resistance to attend work was expressed and tiredness was given as a reason, when it was pointed out that other employee was in work and had been up until the same time employee reluctantly came in.

If you were the absent employee would you assume the text had been received and not attend work?

Text again to see if you could get a response?

Attend work as no guarantee text had been received, explain and ask to go home when convenient if unable to continue working?

Absent staff member has the worst absence record of members in the team. 90% of absences appear to happen on a Friday.

A lot of workplaces require a phone call, not a text, to avoid this type of situation. You need better systems to manage absence, this is a red herring as what if she had been throwing up all night? She certainly couldn't come in even if no return text given.

As a general rule how would you like someone who starts work at 6.10 to report that they won’t be able to come in to work? Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular situation there needs to be a proper procedure for this so cover can be arranged

The official system is a phone call to whoever is in charge. I sleep with my phone on silent but with vibrate activated so a text usually will not wake me but a phone call would as the vibration lasts longer.
There is also a member of boarding staff on call (as the 6:10 start call under boarding, from 9am the staff member is contracted to the main school) so this number could have been contacted so that the boarding manager could assist (there are staff who have food safety certification in boarding in case of snow days/shut down)
You are right to say that if it was vomiting then I would not have expected attendance but to claim tiredness as the reason for non attendance wound me up.

If the staff member has a poor absence record, you shouldn't be focusing on this one absence, but bringing your absence management procedures into play.

You need to look at the underlying reason for the absence pattern - this may be genuine, but undeclared, or it may not, but it's the colleague's manager's responsibility to find this out and offer support/set attendance expectations as appropriate.

This would also be an opportunity to clarify reporting procedure.

As pp said, time to start playing the long game and actively managing the absences as whole/giving warnings if not following procedures.

The process needs to be made clear to the employee, and they need to follow the process. If they don't, appropriate measures need to be taken with that employee.

I think there are two separate issues here.

1 - she didn't follow correct procedure. But if she'd rung you, would you have taken the call at midnight? You say she could have rung the school - if so, would they have been able to arrange cover for 6am the same day? Texting isn't ideal but at midnight when you're stressed and worried it seems the logical thing to do, though she should have followed up with a phone call in the morning.

2 - the reasons for the absence.

What have you done to escalate the pattern of absence previously? Time to start taking formal action.