There is an employee I have been working with that told me she is sick a week ago. Yesterday, I tried to contact her through the usual channels and she did not respond. Yesterday she told me that she will call me back through SMS, she did not.
She holds some very important data to the team and I have no idea how to get them back. Should I keep calling her? Try a different number? Or something else?
I do not have any signals that the employee was unhappy, so I am not sure what happened, really.
The whole point of "sick leave" is that the person is not feeling well and cannot work. She might be resting, she might be out for doctors appointments or physical therapy, she might have taken prescription medicine that makes her drowsy and forgetful, she might lie down in a dark room with piercing headaches that worsen when looking at a light source or computer screen, to make a long story short: she is not fit to work. So don't expect her to do more than the legal minimum, which in my state is notify their employer (which she did), present documentation (which you don't seem to be concerned about, so I guess it's fine) and doing everything in her power to get well soon (which, one could argue, you are actively hindering).
If she has important information that is only in her head and not on file somewhere accessible, that is not her problem, that is your problem as an organisation. Spend the time to improve your processes that this does not happen again. Because she or someone else will get sick again.
Check with your HR what is allowed in your state. Then chose the most unintrusive way to contact her. Maybe email, because that will not sound any bells and does not require immediate attention.
First you say this:
“Yesterday I tried to contact her through the usual channels and she did not respond - yesterday she told me that she will call me back through SMS, but she did not.”
I think she didn’t contact you because… She’s sick and out of the office as a result. You should be grateful she was able to respond to you at all. Your impatience and apparent tone deafness to the idea she is sick is not a motivating factor for her to respond to you.
“I do not have any signals that the employee was unhappy, so I am not sure what happened, really.”
She’s not unhappy: She is sick! While you—and your team—might have business needs to retrieve that data from her I am going to lay out some basic facts:
If this means a business process fails, it fails. Your supervisors should be alerted as soon as possible about this and you should indicate clearly that you reached out and did not hear back and—this is important—you don’t feel she should be bothered any further if she’s sick.
You cannot for any reason play this dysfunctional game where an employee is somehow “important” because they are the sole possessor of business data yet they are somehow a “burden” because how dare they get sick in the middle of some critical business need.
In addition to the other correct answers:
Depending on your country and applicable legislation, repeated attempts to contact an employee on sick leave may well be illegal. Sick leave is an area of employee protection and typically strictly regulated. An employee has clearly defined responsibilities (informing the company, providing the appropriate doctor papers, etc.) but also clearly defined protections. Some of those are intended to protect against harassment by the employer, and repeated contact attempts might get you into that area. It could be argued that you are trying to pressure an employee.
In addition, in many countries, working is explicitly prohibited during sick leave. Answering even one work e-mail is a work activity. You might get your employee into trouble (with the health insurance that pays for everything, for example). Granted, it is unlikely that this is ever found out, but that's not a good reason.
The short is that an employee on sick leave is unavailable. Instead of contacting her, you need to explore other options:
Depending on your country and applicable legislation -> Please add to your answer to which country yours is applicable (though I'm thinking the US, to "assume" makes an ASS out of U and ME ;) ) - What you've written might apply to where you are, but not where I am (The Netherlands). +1 though :)
There are many reasons why a sick person might not be responding immediately and hassling her like an overly-jealous boyfriend will not do you any favours and may do a lot of harm.
The fact that you didn't think to store crucial data in a place accessible to the organisation is your screw-up but there might be ways to retrieve it yourself. How did she come across the data? If it was emailed, it might be somewhere on your Exchange server. If it was a share or URL, see if you can find the link in emails sent to her work address (or internet history, if your organisation keeps tabs on those).
Bear in mind this may not be possible or insanely difficult to do in a larger organisation. If she is the author, you're SOL until she gets back or is well enough to send it. As such, it might be a good time to familiarise yourself with the Bus Factor and revise your policies.
What to do when an employee on sick leave has important data and isn't responding?
You take the delay to work with your management to develop policies that eliminate any single-person bottlenecks in your organization.
There is no reason important company data should be accessible through only one person.
She holds some very important data to the team and I have no idea how to get them back. Should I keep calling her? Try a different number? Or something else?
The correct answer depends on the labor laws in your locale, the importance of this critical data, and what you have tried so far.
In some locales, you cannot expect a sick employee to do any work at all - not even talking with you. Check to see if that sort of work rule exists in your locale.
Since she indicated she would get back to you, it's reasonable to assume that she is amenable to helping you, but just hasn't done so yet. She contacted you via some medium - phone, text, email - using that same medium just explain what you need from her and ask her what would be the best way to get the data.
If you still get no response, talk to her boss. Ask if there is someone else who can provide the data you need.
If she has been out sick for a week and continues to be out going forward, her boss should probably work with HR to consider whatever short-term disability process applies in your locale and company.
All legal & labour laws aside, tell her why you are calling.
Should you be texting me saying "call back, is critical!", you would get no attention.
"Please call back because of info X and Y is needed asap for deadline of project K" would get at least a glance to the phone and I may be able to give you a one sentence answer about how to find all the info you need.
Providing clear concise information about your need shows to the recipient that you value their time, cutting all the steps needed to get to the point, allowing for a quick assessemet of the request.
I find the above valid as a general advice, more so if your counterpart is on sick leave and may be dealing with unpleasant personal issues.
The sick person got the important information in some way. What is the cost to have some other person get the important information again without help from the sick person? This cost can be money or time or some other resource.
You played poker by having only one person with this important information and fate called your bluff. Pay the price, move on, do better next time.
You could ask the employee via SMS that you need exactly the important information XY and if they see a way to give it to you or if it is better to start for with another employee from scratch. This will show the sick person how important the information is, but also that they are not pressured into giving the information if they are just not able to.
In one of the companies I worked there was a huge wiki where really all information of every project went. Something was missing and you found the person who had it? You let them write it down or wrote it down yourself, but the next time someone needed the information, he was able to search for and find it. I think a wiki is more powerful than a bunch of files on a shared drive, because searching for stuff is a lot faster.
If the important information is a password or login information, make sure you have a company wide password manager, that your IT staff knows how to access emails, for example when you click on a forgotten password link. The email used to access other services should also be documented in the wiki and/or password mananger, and so on.
Create an enviroment where no data is stored in the heads of people but everything on real storage media, accessible by all, or at least with access grantable to everyone by your IT staff.
Aside from the described physiological and legal reasons, at least in the US, there are further, significant financial reasons for your company not to allow to contact sick employees - most insurances that cover such 'STL' or 'STD' (Short Term Leave or Disability) will require that strictly no work is done by the covered sick employee, and that excludes even a single bit answer about work.
The reason is that if the employee can answer questions, he is not disabled from work, and the company gets value and therefore should pay the salary. If this would be allowed (or even only tolerated), companies could simply move all their developers on STD, pay no salaries (the insurance would do that), and have them continue working. Be assured some would try that.
If the STD insurance of your employee catches you discussing work-related topics during 'sickness', they can sue your company for defrauding them. That would get quite expensive, and your company would quickly run out of alternate insurance companies.
[we are even required to disable remote access for all sick employees, on the day insurance starts paying. What a pain]
I don't agree at all with the general consensus among the answers above. Your expectation that your sick colleague should respond to phone calls and e-mails are perfectly normal. The fact that someone can't work efficiently for eight hours doesn't mean that one can't work at all.
Ask yourself if this person had small kids, would (s)he need to board out them because (s)he would be unable to take care of them? Of course, that might happen and if that is the case you probably can't expect this person to answer e-mails but in 99 cases out of 100 someone who is on sick leave is still be able to take care of their children, and if they can take care of children they can answers some e-mails or phone calls. Simple as that.
Finally a comment on the criticism you received for "single-point-of-failure". Yes of course one should avoid that but what if this important information was generated the afternoon before the morning when this person called in sick? Maybe it was part of this person's task to write a protocol after an important meeting with the explicit purpose to avoid single-point-of-failures but (s)he failed to fulfil that duty. Should they hire two secretaries for each such meeting? That is completely unreasonable when the alternative solution is that the sick person just answers her/his phone.
