RAPIDLY-RISING blood pressure is just one of the ailments employers suffer due to sick employees, and no wonder, when statistics indicate that owner-managers are far less likely to suffer any type of illness at work than their PAYE employees.

It's not just a case of 'I can't afford to be sick' though, which indicates that much of the absences taken due to ill health are unnecessary. It's often more about subtler personal perceptions than it is about sneezes or aches, and there's no quick fix to the problem.

There's no easy way to distinguish real sickness that deserves time off and sympathy from bogus ailments which merely camouflage a penchant for giving in to the love of the mid week lie-in and a passion for daytime TV.

High rates of sickness absence are usually more about the absence of leadership, though, than about health management.

Because when people start taking more and more time off work, claiming ill health, there has to be some dynamic response and some sense among the employee body that somebody, somewhere, is keeping a watching eye.

Too often there is no real system in place proactively to manage absences, monitor, record, intervene and get stuck in to the issue to try to reduce wilful abuse and pathetic misuse of the system.

The number of production days being lost and profits being dwindled away because of a growing body of apparently vulnerable employees is the constant focus of research and academic attention. Figures are bandied about but it's difficult to quantify the costs, as they're not just financial.

The morale effects are there too: one person using sick leave as what others consider a much-deserved minibreak can mean frustration and disaffection in a team of ten, so that the rest of the team's motivation and commitment starts to dwindle.

Even though there may be no direct competition between team members, we are all competing with each other at a subtler level insofar as we appraise our own effort-reward ratio to those of our peers, and if the peers are expending less effort for the same reward, our chips are down and we will gradually see our own commitment eroded.

Work can be frightening for the best of us, and getting up on a Monday morning is seldom easy. In a world where underachievement is undervalued, there's a huge swathe of us dragging ourselves into work everyday paying lip service to the notion of virtuous toil and duty and really hoping the pipes will have burst or some catastrophe will have befallen our building so we can head straight home again and be playing with the remote by 10 am.

By the time we go through the motions of preparing ourselves for the day and getting through the traffic, though, we're job-ready when we reach the desk and engage with the process for the day;

we become motivated, occasionally invigorated and now and then delighted with the fantastic things we're doing at work.

Overcoming the wish to stay put and idle the day away is beneficial, of course, and pays dividends in many ways.

But for those on the constant absence list, the motivation to work and the commitment to the organisation has been lost, and replaced instead by some dependency on taking time out and switching off.

And for far too many employers, these cases are assigned to the 'too difficult' tray and left unmanaged.

Many people 'out sick' are really out sick and return to work when they're better, with their energies restored.

These are only half the population of exiles though, and the first point to remember when trying to develop some model to prevent increasing rates of sickness absence is systematically to distrust ordinary explanations people give for their behaviour, without resorting to distrusting the individuals themselves.

If Susan says she's out with a headache every second Monday and the odd Thursday too, and gets backache for a week most winters and a sprain the last week in July, she may be correct. She may not, and she may think she's correct. Or she may simply be over-reliant on anthologising whimsical distresses so that she feels deserving of the 'break' she intends to take.

To begin to understand why people abuse sickness absence, even when they are not being paid for their absence, it's important to remember that we learn to label our feelings as children.

How we categorise 'well' and 'sick' develops from our broader and cruder categorisation of 'happy' and 'sad', the positive and the negative emotions we sense when young and bring meaning to through our experiences and what we see around us.

We also model our labelling on our parents and elders - we learn our behaviour from theirs, we inherit labelling systems from them, and adopt categorisation systems from them.

So serial leave-takers are not necessarily chancers or wasters or fakers. There will probably be a small minority of such employees, but there will be many more who simply haven't learnt how to manage their own workplace attendance in a healthy way because they have become habituated to opting out at the first hint of a breeze or the sight of a raindrop.

Quite a number of them must have worked at British Airways up to a few years ago, when the average sickness absence rate for an employee was 22 days annually, substantially higher than the national average for either the UK or Ireland, or indeed, both together.

A concerted effort by BA human resources and occupational health teams kicked in a few years ago which saw that figure drop to 'just' 12 days per employee. It was that sickness management policy and process, as well as pension entitlement issues, that led to the threat of industrial action by 11,000 of the 14,000 cabin crew last week.

Reports tell us the strike was averted through talks between ACAS, the UK conciliation service and the Transport and General Workers Union, although as the strike action was planned to span Monday to Wednesday, it may have been called off due to sickness absence, even.

Of the studies carried out into the causes of sickness absence and the prompters for early return to work, it appears that both a supportive management structure and some degree of organisational surveillance are crucially and equally important.

If people feel their absence is noticed, recorded and counted, and that it will be brought to their personal attention regularly, and if they also feel there's a support system for them - be it welfare, occupational health or simply a listening manager - they are less likely to abuse a sickness absence scheme.

Unfortunately, many organisations use just one or other of these, whereas the two together are far more effective.

Larger companies, where personal relationships are less prevalent and faceless HR departments are seen as sick cert repositories, people feel anonymous and are more prone to absence abuses than people working in smaller outfits where the one-to-one relationship still dominates.

When we feel like cogs in a wheel or mini-machines, our emotional contract with the employer is dulled so that we can more easily take advantage without feeling guilt. The purpose of any good monitoring system is to bring back personal accountability to the work attendance area, to make the person feel a valid contribution is being made by them - or could be made, if they showed up now and then - and finally to forewarn them that somebody, somewhere, is watching.

Absence management systems involve software packages and personal intervention:

1: Monitor absence days and causes over a minimum threshold.

2.Have an escalating intervention system - third incidence of absence in 12 months, for instance.

3.Carry out re-entry interviews consistently.

4.Follow through on any actions identified.

5. Ensure managers are proficient in absence management techniques and procedures.

6.Give regular feedback and motivational sessions with long-term serial absentees.

Patricia Murray is an organisational and work psychologist