A lot of times employees will miss time from work, but they don’t have the information necessary to ask for FMLA, which grants unpaid time off to employees to deal with an illness. There’s a little gotcha in that law though, that often snares employers: The employee is not required to ask specifically for FMLA. If the employer has sufficient information to believe or come to the conclusion that the employee needs time off to deal with a medical issue, the employer has to bring it up to the employee’s attention. There’s no magic word in here that the employee has to say before qualifying for Family Medical Leave time off.