Happy Saturday! Today’s 1 Smart Business Story looks at a workplace problem that is easy to dismiss, but costly to ignore: employees coming to work sick. 

Most leaders agree: If you are ill, stay home. In principle. Yet in practice, many workplaces—particularly as AI companies adopt extreme hustle cultures like the 996 work schedule—and reward showing up at all costs. 

The result is a quiet contradiction that affects productivity, trust, and company culture far more than it appears on the surface. 

Inc.’s work advice columnist Alison Green tackles a question leaders raise repeatedly: How do you stop employees from coming in sick—especially when it’s at the expense of your colleagues? 

In this piece you will see:

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I don’t want them spreading their germs to others.

BY ALISON GREEN

People in my office frequently come into work very obviously sick and many times get other people sick. Most people do not have the ability to work from home with the work we do. We’ve sent a firm-wide message telling people that we prefer that sick employees stay home, as to stop the spread to the rest of the staff. Unfortunately, this didn’t make much of a difference. I understand that people want to save their paid time off for more enjoyable times, but it’s not fair to the coworkers to whom they spread their germs. (We also offer six paid sick days, separate from vacation and personal leave.)

What else can we do?

There are three very effective ways of getting sick people to stay home, but companies have to do all three to get it to work:

1. Offer generous paid sick time. Six days a year is low; the average number of sick days in the U.S. is seven days a year, with over half of employers offering five to nine, and another quarter offering 10 or more. (And of course, the U.S. is notoriously stricter with paid time off than most other industrialized countries.)

People are far more likely to come to work sick if they don’t have a generous sick leave set-up. Even if they technically have days available, they might not take them, figuring they might need to save them for later in the year. For example, if you have a bad cold in January, are you really going use half of your annual sick leave on it, leaving yourself only a few days for the next 11 months? And if you do, that makes it more likely you’ll show up at work when you get ill in October. This is even more true for people who struggle with chronic health problems who have to choose between staying home with a virus or keeping that time off for more serious issues.

Employers who really mean it when they say “stay home if you’re sick” need to back that up by giving people enough days off to do it without worry.

2. Don’t just give lip service to the idea that people should stay home when they’re sick.Things that will quickly cancel out any campaign to stop sick people from coming in: managers who grumble or seem put out when people call in sick, managers who never take any sick time themselves, awards for perfect attendance, and other signals that what the company really wants is for people to never get sick in the first place.

3. Have enough coverage available so people feel they can take the day off. If you’re so short-staffed that there’s no practical way to miss a day of work without problems (either with coverage while you’re gone or with a pile of work that will await you when you’re back), a lot of people will decide it’s better to just drag themselves in.

If employers are serious about wanting sick people to stay home, they’d do the three things above. If they don’t, they’re not putting their money where their (germy) mouths are. In that case, they don’t really want it — they just want not to have to deal with the reality that their employees are humans who get sick.

Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to [email protected].

_{The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.}