At the CIPD’s ‘Absence Management’ conference in London last week, Ben Willmott, employee relations adviser at the Institute, pointed out that mental ill health is the second largest cause of time lost through sickness absence (behind musculo-skeletal conditions) and that more than half the problems come from stress, depression and anxiety.

The causes of work-related stress cited by CIPD make for familiar reading, with workload the major culprit. It’s followed by management style, organizational change and restructuring, relationships at work, and pressure to meet targets.

And according to research from economist Francis Green, referenced by Willmott in his presentation, technological advances are also a factor in ‘work intensity’, or how hard UK employees think they work. It’s widely accepted that the combined weight of the internet, email, IM and mobile devices take their toll in upping the pace of life in the office and help blur the boundaries between home life and work.

But what about technology’s role in helping organizations manage absence? Some of the practical steps that the CIPD recommends organizations take to tackle absence include carrying out return to work interviews, introducing trigger mechanisms to review attendance, implementing disciplinary procedures for unacceptable absence, and encouraging line managers to take primary responsibility for managing it. That means, of course, that organizations will also need to provide absence information to line managers and ensure they’re properly trained to do something with it.

In turn that means having some kind of system that can monitor absence data, control the associated processes and workflows, give managers access to information whenever they need it, and administer training. You could do that on paper or spreadsheets – but most organizations with more than a couple of hundred employees will probably be better off extending their HR management system to help, especially if they have self-service capability built in. Given that absence is also linked to performance – and declining performance is one of 17 stress indicators identified by Willmott, along with factors such as an inability to concentrate, loss of enthusiasm and over-reaction to problems – you might even want to link it to a performance management system for good measure. No software system can cure all the ills of absence, of course – but there’s no point tackling a twenty-first century problem with twentieth century tools.