I`m quite intrigued by some HR professionals attitude to absence management as  I believe and have proved at a number of companies that absence levels can be vastly reduced by starting with an assumption that most absence is simply not geniune.

For instance look at your management absence rates in your organisation, I bet most of us have typically absence here of say between 1 and 2%, however look at say employees on the shopfloor or in a call centre and their rates are often 5% upwards.

Why is this?  Are these people 5 times more ill than former group I described ?  If not is the premise that we HR people work from i.e. that 99% of absence is genuine fundamentally flawed?