I worked with someone who did this. It was the HR person. She just didn’t show up one day, didn’t answer her phone or door. For a solid week. After a wellness check by the police, it was revealed that she was fine, just couldn’t go back in to work because she hated her job so much.
I was young, and it was a shitty grocery chain filled with shitty management and shitty customers. I 100% thought she had killed herself, or skipped town for some other awful reason. It was a relief to hear she was OK. Fuck that store.
Yesterday, I (sort of) learned the phrase “implication arrows,” from which I learned that I should assume that this story is not true, though the arrows… Imply that it’s true. I still don’t really get it.
Anyway, I’ve never held a job where the employer would do more than the bare minimum required by law if I disappeared. Certainly not so much as contacting my family unless there were extenuating circumstances like me verifiably disappearing mid shift. I suspect this is true for most people.
As a manager I would definitely contact an employee’s emergency contacts and then request a welfare check if one of my team dropped off the face of the earth. Medical incidents happen and a couple of the team live alone that I know of.
In that case, you sound like a good manager to have.
I like my current managers, but I think if I stopped showing I’d eventually just stop getting paid. There was a period where I wasn’t attending daily meetings because I hadn’t received the invitation to them. Eventually I made a comment to my manager that I was glad the current contract didn’t require a ridiculous number of meetings and he said something like “what are you talking about? There are daily meetings. We just thought you were out sick or something.”
