As if employers don't have enough to contend with in terms of sickness absence, another issue has been highlighted recently: websites selling fake doctors' sick notes.

IRS is currently offering free benchmarking reports on UK employers’ absence rates and labour turnover levels in exchange for information about your own organisation’s figures for 2007.

In exchange for providing (on a confidential basis) your organisation's staff absence and turnover figures, we will provide you a free copy of the results of our research as soon as they are available. You’ll also gain access to a copy of our findings for absence and labour turnover rates in 2006 immediately after you complete the online questionnaire.

Throughout January the questions you asked most often covered a variety of subjects including: return-to-work interviews; “last in, first out” as a redundancy selection criterion; grievances raised after the employee has left the company; pregnant employees who have used up their company sick pay entitlement; and whether or not there is a statutory obligation to pay employees for their rest breaks. The month's top 10 questions are listed below – simply click on the links for the answers.

What with annual leave entitlement now standing at 24 days, and a rise to 28 days on the cards, plus in most instances eight or nine bank holidays on top of that and a host of arrangements for special leave, you might think most people get enough days off.

It is that wonderful time of year once again when absences soar as people go down with nasty bugs.

The new year special for 2008 appears to be norovirus – better known to most of us as the winter vomiting virus. And what makes the bug's day is when people return to work and school after the holidays so it can really spread around the place.

Several of the most frequently asked HR questions throughout November concern sickness absence and cover the issues of covert surveillance where there are suspicions about the genuineness of the sickness, decreasing pay to reflect a phased return to work, and payment during the notice period where sick pay has been exhausted. The subject of rewarding low sickness absence also features.

Two in three employers believe that return-to-work interviews have cut absence rates, our latest IRS survey (subscription required) shows.

Our survey of 182 employers, covering 705,000 employees, shows that return-to-work interviews are highly effective in recording and managing absence.

But employers are growing increasingly frustrated with line managers' lack of commitment to using return-to-work interviews to manage absence.

If you turned up at work today only to be confronted by a virtually empty office then, instead of starting to panic about your employees' whereabouts, you should have checked the calendar. A quick glance at your, no doubt slightly tacky, corporate promotion desk calendar would have confirmed it was Friday, the day most likely for your staff to have found something to do other than pitch up at work.

Click here to complete our benchmarking survey on return-to-work interviews to ensure you receive a complimentary copy of the final report.

A return-to-work interview can be an effective tool in managing and monitoring absence within organisations - that is clear from IRS's latest research (subscription required). But the role of line managers is key to ensuring just how effective this absence-management tool can be.