What Should Your Sick Policy Be?
I had a pretty simple policy regarding being sick:
If you’re healthy you should come to work. If you’re sick, you should stay home.
And I followed my sick policy as CEO as best I could.
There were days when, no matter how badly I felt, I had to be at work. Sometimes those days ended right after the key meeting that I had to be there for completed.
Then I went home and I got the rest I needed.
No one ever thought I was taking advantage of my role as CEO.
There were also employees that I had to tell to go home.
Dave, our operations director, had an incredible work ethic. He would come into the office regardless of how bad he was feeling.
“There’s work to be done,” he would say. Then I would tell him to go home and rest.
Two hours later he would be emailing and following up at home.
The more important question is what will your sick policy be?
I recommend the simple policy I described earlier. If you’re healthy, come to work. If you’re sick, stay home.
It’s simple and easy. And it saves you time because you don’t need to track sick days or have employees fill out sick time requests.
Don’t worry about people taking advantage of your simple sick time policy either. It’s self correcting because employees that abuse the system will not be there because they can’t their work done.
For more, read: What Are The Five Skills You Need To Be A Great CEO?