Stay Home When You Are Sick!

By Marcie Barnes

I mentioned at the end of my last post how it would be nice if more people stayed home when they are sick. I think too many times people try to be heroic and come into the office to impress their boss. I don't really understand this logic. Odds are, a contagious co-worker will infect additional members of the team, subsequent offices, and perhaps affect the whole building. From the perspective of company impact, if that one person stayed home one or two days it could potentially prevent hundreds from getting sick, not being able to do their job well - and possibly being able to come into work altogether.

This man was fined for reporting to work with a salmonella diagnosis. Undoubtedly, because he works in the food service industry, his actions were seen as intentional and harmful. I agree that he had potential to really make a lot of people sick in that setting, but what is the difference between that and if I were to go to work sick? Say I make a friendly visit to the salad bar - easily, hundreds of people frequent the salad bar after I do, they disperse to their respective offices and buildings, and in turn infect more people around them.

I know that hand washing is touted as a cure-all, but I don't believe most people take the proper steps to wash their hands in order to truly to kill germs (or wash them at all), and sick people tend to cough and sneeze a lot anyway. Plus, hand washing has it's own set of negatives.

For further reading, here's another article with a similar perspective.