The right-pondians may point and laugh now.

[serinde]

Joe's out with the strep that Eli had.

8782 is out with what jdev has, which is what Ed had, which may or may not be what Brian had...

If people could just BLOODY WELL STAY HOME when sick without having to hoard their sick days against the fear of future need, this office would not be a ghost town today.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

I'm assuming that you have unified Paid Time Off for sick and vacation time, or some equivalent, as most US companies seem to these days.
Given that, it can only be expected that a person who is able to come into the office while ill will do so, since they might get ill again in future, run out of sick time, get docked holiday time, and not be able to go on holiday. That's really bad when you've promised your kids a trip to Disneyland later in the year.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

True and true, but I still don't quite see where it gets back to billing the person and not everyone, is all.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Instead of everyone taking the cost of the sick time (though less efficiency in the company, or the country at large) the person themselves gets to take the cost; they get a certain number of allowed sick days and then they lose holiday time (which is valuable).
"bill" wasn't a very good word to use there, I should have said "cost". The cost of being ill, in (potential) lost holiday time, is pushed directly to the sick person. Of course they will try to dodge this every time.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Actually, we don't. If we did have fully unified time off, there'd be even more reason to hoard sick days, because every single one would be a vacation day lost. What we do, at least in theory, have is a fallback scheme: if the sick days run out, first personal days and then vacation days are used in their stead.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Oh, OK. I am failing to process anything not involved with DSL, today. And I'm not processing THAT stuff, either.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

So, if you're sick now and in future, you can run out of sick days and your holidays (and personal days) get docked. This gives you the same clear incentive to minimise your sick time off now just in case you're sick again in future since you may want to take a vacation too.
The actual way to remove this perverse incentive is not to remove people's holiday time if they are ill even if it is more than you want. Deal with the personnell issue raised by a lot of illness some other way (like insuring your company against a very sick employee so it's not a hit to your company and you can hire a replacement for them without extra cost).