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.