Tip Tuesday! FMLA: Is phone text enough to provide notice of need for leave?

by Christian Schappel

More employees are communicating with their managers via texts. So what are your managers supposed to do when a text contains possible medical or FMLA-related info? 

That’s a tricky question, and the answer, quite frankly, depends on two things:

• What your leave policy or call-in policies say, and
• How your managers have treated employees’ texts in the past.

Courts will look to both to see what kind of precedent you’ve set.

Take a recent FMLA lawsuit against Tyson Fresh Meats as a warning on both of these fronts.

Tyson had a call-in policy that stated:

“All management Team Members are expected to personally call their direct supervisor to report an unplanned absence or to report that they will be late.”

This is not unlike a lot of call-in policies employers are allowed to (and do) tie to their FMLA policies that require employees to call in prior to an absence — even an FMLA-related one. Courts have upheld terminations in which an employee out on FMLA leave was fired for failing to abide by such a policy.

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