“I’ll Let the Emergency Know” — Woman Left Baffled by Manager’s Two-Hour Shift Call Out Policy

A woman who had to miss a shift due to an emergency was left baffled by her manager's response. Miami Lee (@leeyuhuniverse) posted a viral TikTok detailing her gripe with the boss's reply, and it seems that several other users on the app also shared in her frustrations.

"Y'all, I called out of work yesterday and the lady talking about some 'Make sure you call out two hours in advance before you call out.'"

Lee didn't believe that this type of call-out protocol made sense, bluntly stating, "I'll let the emergency to let me know two hours in advance before it happens to me too."

Consequently, it's impossible for her to know if she's going to have two hours to call out of her shift for an emergency circumstance prior to the emergency occurring. "Like, what the f--k are you talking about?" she says into the camera as the video comes to a close.

Various employers have different policies when it comes to employees calling out. Oftentimes, certain positions come with a specific number of sick and personal days that workers can utilize. Depending on the nature of one's work agreement with the business in question, these days also come with compensation. In some cases, however, they do not.

Sick day laws also vary from state to state. According to Paycor, "private employers in more than a dozen states, plus more than two dozen municipalities across the U.S. are required to provide some form of paid sick leave to an eligible employee."

In many of these states, workers can "accrue" paid sick leave days, with many implementing "accrual" policies. In other words, the more hours an employee works, the more hours of paid sick leave they accrue. In Arizona, for instance, employees receive one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked.

These paid sick leave hours can be used in order to care for themselves or an immediate family member who has fallen ill. The maximum number of sick day hours that can be accrued is 40 hours for businesses with 15+ employees. In small businesses (less than 15) companies are only obligated to offer 24 hours of paid sick leave to their workers.

The case of emergency call outs, however, appears to be an entirely different topic of conversation for some managers. One Reddit user who says that they manage a team of four asked for advice from other users on the application in the r/Leadership sub.

They wanted to know helpful ways they could go about addressing a worker who is constantly experiencing family emergencies and calling out sick.

While they said that the worker in question performs her tasks when she's on shift "pretty well" and shows "initiative," that a week doesn't go by when there isn't a call out.

"She's been with us for less than six months. She handles each task pretty well and she's got initiative which is a +1. Learns fast and can adapt to any task you give her. However, every week she would ask for her shift to be changed to a different day or time because she's either sick, going on a holiday with family, or has a family emergency," they wrote.

One person suggested that they break the issue down into three separate talking points, with each one of these steps being a conversation between them and their worker. Furthermore, they highlighted that the resolution to each of these points should end in a verbally agreed upon understanding.

This way, if these clear and agreed-upon terms are ultimately not followed through on, then they, as a manager, can bring the subject up again to their employee. If the problem persists after ways to address the behavior have been thoroughly discussed, they can ultimately justify why they had to either reduce the worker's shifts or let them go.

The Reddit user broke it down as such: "I use three steps. 1) Observation, objectively explain what you’re seeing in the situation. 2) Expectation, give your goals for what you’d like the situation to be instead. 3) Consequence, what are the actions you will take if the agreed-upon expectations are not met?

This should be a conversation, so with every step, ask your employee to share the same stuff, so you can agree with each other at each step."

A blog post uploaded to the Silvertrac employee timekeeping software website offered some suggestions as to how to best handle excessive employee call outs. Managers are urged to "keep detailed records" in the piece, and to "deal with issues promptly" — akin to what the aforementioned Reddit user recommended.