At least with my solution, they get five tries to notice it's gone. It's basically impossible to test, because to me, this issue is entirely indeterminate.

If I knew a better way to do it, I'd've gladly done it I'm not sure that the method mentioned by /u/ameliagarbo would work if they closed Word, lost the file, opened Word again, didn't notice that the dotm was gone, and closed Word (but hopefully you can do it right here right now). Then I created tasks for me and all my users to fire off that file at 1000 hours. If the issue persists, please try to create a new user account for Mac to narrow down the issue. Check if the issue persists when you close out Word. You can also delete or cut this Normal.dotm file to another location, restart Word 2016 for Mac. Also check the permission for this folder. For the latter, I created a batch file to back up five generations of the local dotm file. Check if you can double-click to open the Normal.dotm file. The former I do manually anyway everyone should do it till it's second nature.

You have to back up your macros, back up the dotm file, or both. My users complained of it as well, but in their case my installation (prior to my arrival) would just copy over someone else's dotm and they'd at least be functional. Fortunately I was scrupulous about backing up my macros.

Normal dotm on mac