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I work in a home health environment. My shift starts before 6 AM and ends at 6 PM. The other staff was scheduled same time as me, but showed up 30 minutes late due to her alarms not going off. That's fine, whatever. But after she showed up, she took her shoes off, pulled her arms in her hoodie, and curled up on the couch to sleep. She's now been sleeping for 35 minutes. Do I text my boss and let him know and risk her losing her job, or do I just let her sleep and hope she wakes up before the clients are supposed to eat breakfast?

She's done this every shift she's worked, that I know of. This is my first time working with her personally. She acts like doing her job is a pain and she doesn't want to complete her responsibilities. We have two completely dependent clients, so her being responsible is imperative. She also has a habit of disappearing for an hour at a time and not letting her coworkers know where she is.

I feel like, as an adult, I should not be responsible for waking her up when she purposely curled up to sleep when our workplace has a no sleeping policy.

Lilienthal
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1 Answers1

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Is this normal behaviour? There's a world of difference between this happening as routine, every shift, or just happening as a completely out of character one off situation.

Assuming it's a one off, heck, just be nice! Wake her up, ask if she's feeling ok, and take things from there. You don't need to defer to a list of responsibilities in the job description for every situation like this.

Alternately, if it's happening every shift (by which I mean it's happened constantly with you, not just stories that you've heard from others), then I'd still have a chat on the lines of "Hi Alice, I've noticed you often seem really tired, are you doing ok?". You can then try to steer the conversation towards getting her to talk to your boss about it and towards a possible solution, which is certainly preferable to you raising this behind her back.

If this doesn't work, then yes, you have the option of talking to your boss about it. But ask your boss how to handle the situation when this occurs rather than just going straight in with a list of complaints.

berry120
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