Wellness Checks

A wellness check is when law enforcement or public safety officials visit  the home of an individual that friends, family, or colleagues have expressed concern about. This post includes guidelines for a wellness check.

If an employee or trainee has been absent without explanation and is unresponsive to your emails, texts, and calls, you can call in a wellness check (sometimes also called a safety check or a welfare check). A wellness check is when law enforcement or public safety officials visit  the home of an individual that friends, family, or colleagues have expressed concern about. Below are guidelines for a wellness check.

  1. First ask other members of your lab as well as any friends or other colleagues that know the missing individual if they've heard from him or her recently. If anybody offers to reach out to the employee, take them up on the offer, and ask them to contact you if they learn anything. Also note if others have made attempts at contact with no result.
  2. Contact the employee by all methods available to you, including email, phone, text, and any sort of online messaging system used by your group (Slack, or Microsoft Teams, for example).
  3. Have ready the employee's name, phone number, address, and birthday. You may need to call HR to get this information.
  4. Look up the non-emergency number for the police department in the township/city where the employee lives. Call, and say that you are requesting a wellness check on your employee, as they have no-call no-showed at work and are unresponsive to other attempts to communicate with them. State the last time anybody heard from them. Then answer any questions the dispatcher asks to the best of your ability.
  5. The dispatcher will communicate with the correct official, and someone will be sent to the home. The dispatcher will also provide you with a time to expect an update. The update usually comes within an hour or two, so be in a position where you can immediately answer your phone and talk to the officer privately. Write down what they tell you.

From this point, next steps depend on what the officer writes back with. Hopefully it is something simple, like the employee is sick, and didn't think to call. In this case, write to the employee expressing sympathy for their issue, explaining the need to check in when possible if something like this happens again, and then wishing them well. You should also let anyone else who tried to contact the employee know that everything is ok, and thank them for their help.

If the absence is not excused, or the employee is not at home, contact HR and ask for advice.