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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Big mistake I see a lot re #7: Baking sick days into your PTO pool, so people have to decide whether to 'spend' PTO on staying out sick. This leads all your employees (especially the young ones) to show up sick all the time and 'power through it' so they can keep saving up PTO, and then they get the whole office sick. It's insane to me that this is so common.

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I can see your point, but as someone with a long sting as a manager in Silicon Valley I can tell you what happens in real life. Employees divide into two groups: the "honest" ones and the "work the system" ones.

The honest ones take sick days when they are sick. Out of ten sick days they take one or three or eight. The number they take each year depends on how sick they got and how often.

The "work the system" ones take the full allotment every year.

So the system is unfair to people who are honest.

Why would you care about the difference between 8 days and 10?

Why bother splitting? Just give a full month off. Use it as you see fit. Spent all of it and now you're sick? Tough luck.

I'm sure there's labour laws that mandate the split. I just can't help but feel that nearly everyone would rather take a guaranteed month of time for "whatever comes up" than "two weeks vacation" and "better make sure you (and your family) aren't sick for more than two weeks annually." Just as I can't help but feel that employers actually prefer the split because dealing with the "'work the system'" ones is cheaper than just treating every employee like an adult by giving them more than a pittance of time away from the office.

The point is 'tough luck' gets the entire office sick by making sick employees come in to work. You almost never want this. It has a tremendous negative effect on productivity.

You also can't ignore the psychological effect of having to 'give up' time off (for a vacation with your kids, or a visit to your parents on their deathbed) in order to avoid going to work sick. It causes people to go to work sick a lot more often, because they can't anticipate when they will need time off. It also diminishes the rate at which they will use vacation time because they can't accurately estimate how often they'll get sick.

>It also diminishes the rate at which they will use vacation time because they can't accurately estimate how often they'll get sick.

Which leads to "use it or lose it" come December, when your entire company stops working because no one is in the office.

How exactly does 2 weeks paid vacation and 8 days paid sick leave change any of this? You're still out of luck if you end up bed-ridden for two weeks with the flu. My alternative of giving everyone a minimum chunk of four weeks --preferably six, but a minimum of four-- of paid time off for whatever reason gives people more breathing room, not less. They get more time off than they would have otherwise. This keeps more sick people out of the office, because they aren't having to worry about eating up precious PTO on what might get the office sick, or might just be a stomach bug.

Honestly, I sense people are latching on to my "tough luck" comment without bothering to think the rest of my comment through.

"work the system" employees will break whatever system you give them. I still think a separate sick day pool is better because sick people don't have a good reason to come to work other than having exhausted their sick days.

Solve the problem by weeding out the employees who work the system, not by moving to PTO-only and making your entire office sick more often to save a little money.

My current workplace has a policy of no sick day pool - just don't come in sick, no policy limit. If you're abusing the system, your manager will bring it up with you.

Same here. The work has to get done, but nothing is so critical that it can't wait a few days. If it is, we'll get someone else to do it.

The problem there is the word "allotment". How can you allocate in advance how many sick days to give? If you allot (say) four days sick each year, and an employee is sick three times, surely the rational choice towards the end of the year is to "use up" that allotment?

Without an allotment, employees will generally take a sick day when they're actually sick. Sometimes you'll notice someone who seems to take a lot of sick days. In that case you want to have a friendly chat with them - it's almost never the case that they're just taking free days, rather it's almost always situations like: they're not happy for some reason, they need flex working, they can't afford to repair a car and the commute is worse, they're suffering stress, etc etc. In other words, things it is useful to know about so you can help them (and hence help the company).

Sick day allotments are a way of ineffective managers avoiding confrontations with people: they just end up punishing everyone.

Wait..

In the US, you have an "allotment" of sick days (say around 10), that defines how many days you can take off sick?

(In the UK) I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing. Surely people are sick however much they are sick? You can't limit your sickness to 10 days a year!

"paid" sick days. You can be sick for more than 10 days a year, but you won't be paid for all of them. Different companies have different policies. The company I work for has just a general PTO pool, and you take that for your sick days and your vacation.

How is that different from saying you have to take a vacation day when you are sick?

As a person who has been a manager for several different companies, including my own, my solution is to fire dishonest employees.

Or, to put it another way: why are you punishing your better employees?

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