You may have missed this in the pre-Memorial Day revelry, but Merrill Lynch caught a lot of flak last week for a major change in its sick day policy. Employees used to be able to take up to four days 10 times during the year, but under the new “attendance guidelines,” workers only get to take three sick days at once before they have to talk to their managers about their absences and the impact on their jobs. At the seventh day of absence, Merrill Lynch workers may get docked pay and receive a written warning, and upon the ninth day of absence, firing is “recommended.”

This may sound like a big change, but a Merrill Lynch spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that the new sick day guidelines are just a “minor policy adjustment,” adding: “We’re trying to reduce the number of people taking every Friday off in July.” The policy changes, according to the spokesperson, simply bring Merrill Lynch sick policy in line with that of its competitors.

Yes, this may simply be a change to stay competitive for Merrill Lynch, but I was struck by the nuttiness of enacting a new corporate-wide policy for 60,000-plus employees rather than dealing head-on with what seems to be a more basic problem: a raft of workers calling in “sick” so they could take three-day weekends during the summer. Why didn’t Merrill management just deal with that issue directly?

I was also struck by the abrupt change from an over-the-top-generous sick day policy (essentially 40 days a year) to an incredibly miserly one (only three days before you have to explain yourself). This yo-yo from one extreme to the other not only sends a terrible message to the workforce, but it makes employees wonder just what might come next. And employees who have something like this dropped on them out of the blue can conjure up all sorts of nasty scenarios if they don’t have any other context for what the company is doing, and why.

Workers don’t need much to distract them from the job at hand. My guess is that whatever Merrill saves in the long run from this policy change it will give back in the short run from a less-productive workforce that is now focused on what all of this new policy-making means, and what might come next.