Awol Absent With Out Leave

Unplanned absence covers several situations that look similar on an attendance report and are not similar at all.

The row that matters is the third. An employee who telephones to say they cannot attend has not gone absent without leave, whatever the manager thinks of the reason. The defining feature of AWOL is that nobody knows where they are.

That distinction is worth holding on to, because it determines what the employer should do first.

An employee who has never previously been unreliable and who does not appear and does not call has, more often than organisations expect, had something happen to them. Hospital admission, an accident, a family bereavement, arrest and a domestic emergency all present exactly this way.

The first response should therefore be to try to make contact rather than to open a file.

• Call the numbers on record, more than once and at more than one time of day.
• Contact the emergency contact held on the employee record, which is what it is there for.
• Check whether anyone in the team has heard from them.
• Record what was attempted and when, because this becomes the evidence later that the employer acted reasonably.

Organisations that begin with a disciplinary letter on day one occasionally find themselves having sent it to someone in intensive care. The sequence costs nothing and protects against the worst version of the mistake.

Where attempts at contact fail, the position shifts from welfare to process, and the process should be written down before it is needed rather than improvised.

The steps that make a later decision defensible are straightforward. Write to the address on record, by a method that produces proof of dispatch. Say plainly that the absence is unauthorised, that the employer has been unable to make contact, and that an explanation is required by a stated date. Say what will happen if no response is received. Then wait the stated period.

A second letter is usually worth sending, because the first may not have arrived and because two attempts read very differently from one if the matter is examined later.

Throughout this, the employee remains employed. The absence is likely to be unpaid, which is a separate question from whether the employment continues, and conflating the two is where employers create problems for themselves.

Abandonment of employment is the conclusion that an employee has, by their conduct, ended the relationship. It is a conclusion the employer reaches, not a status that arrives by itself after a set number of days.

A handbook clause saying that absence beyond a stated period will be treated as abandonment is useful for setting expectations and does not by itself make the conclusion safe. What makes it safe is having tried to make contact, having written to the last known address, having given a reasonable opportunity to respond, and having a record of all of it.

Where the employee later reappears with an explanation, the explanation has to be considered rather than dismissed because a deadline passed. A serious explanation, particularly hospitalisation or custody, will usually make a decision taken without hearing it hard to sustain.

Standing orders, where they apply to the establishment, may prescribe the procedure for unauthorised absence directly, and where they do, that procedure governs rather than the handbook.

Several ordinary administrative decisions cause more trouble than the absence itself.

• Stopping pay is normally correct for unworked days and should be recorded as unpaid absence, not as a deduction from an existing entitlement without instruction.
• Removing the employee from payroll altogether before the process concludes turns an attendance matter into a claim about wages.
• Cancelling access and equipment early is prudent for security and reads as a decision already taken. Record the security reason if it is done.
• Recording the exit reason accurately matters, because abandonment and resignation are not the same and the record will be relied on later.

Where the absence ends in an exit, the ordinary settlement obligations still apply to what was earned before it. Treating an abandonment as though it extinguishes accrued entitlements is a common and expensive assumption.