Ace of Spaces thinks people who are sick should stay the hell home. I tend to agree, but I’m being a hypocrite today saying that. I feel like dirt, yet I’m still at work. Granted, no way in hell I’d come to work with the flu, but I shouldn’t really even come in with a cold, and risk making other people sick and miserable.
The problem is, I am a hoarder.  Company policy is that we get six days of sick time a year, but we get to deposit unused time into a “sick bank”. Given that a cold will last up to a week, I can’t really afford to take the time off and still have anything left over should I get the flu, and the flu is particularly bad this year. My instinct is to hoard sick days for a serious illness, rather than the sniffly coughy kinds of illness.
Wise companies will encourage or force sick employees to stay home, so as not to contaminate a company’s entire labor pool, but most HR people, who make these policies, tend to enjoy putting the cart before the horse. If you create policies that discourage people from taking sick days, you can’t be surprised when people show up sick, and the plague spreads through the company like wildfire. I think for most HR types, it’s more of a priority to prevent employees from treating sick time like vacation. Good employees won’t do that (at least not much), but human resources departments will seldom want to blame bad hiring and bad performance management practices, which are hard to fix, when you can appear to fix the problem with a few simple policy changes. Giving the appearance of action is a pretty fundamental drive for lazy people who want to look good for others who won’t bother to look all that closely.