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laplongejr t1_ir9825o wrote

> With enough notice I can either find someone to cover

As a manager, what do you do when you have no notice at all?
My wife got sent in the hospital in emergency because she fainted around 4pm. She was 18 at the time and not allowed to call her parents, because you know, she's an adult. She had to plead to be allowed to call... at 10pm.

> but I do need you to make sure I know, and 5 hours is pushing it.

In our country, emergency hospital procedure is that the patient is not allowed basically anything if there's no doctor to examine : no eating, no calling. If no doctor is available you're basically in prison because they have no idea what is or is not a danger to yourself.

The fact is that you are running a business, and you need to plan for the case where an employee will not even be good enough to follow the sick policy.
If your employee get hit by a car, do you let the coworker handle the entire shift?

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jaydoes t1_irblota wrote

Depends on the employee and how busy, but for me if it's someone experienced, I trusted that person to make the call and maybe I can get them some help or the next shift person to come in early. I generally hired compassionate people so in the case of something major I could get someone a lot of the time. If necessary I would cover it myself, but working 50 or 60 hours a week gets really old really fast. Usually my policy was as long as we get 24 hours notice or it is actually an emergency, that wouldn't be reflected on a person's record. Short notice or not showing up was considered an inexcused absence and there's still no consequence unless you rack up 3 of them in a year, at which point we would call the person and and talk about what we can do. I tried to be nice, so if it's like a scheduling problem or something we can resolve then we will do that. But it's not fair to the other employees to just let it go.

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