It was great to see the government going digital last week when it unveiled plans to replace paper ‘sick notes’ with electronic ‘fit notes’. But are employers ready to match this modest step towards automation in absence management? Chances are that the first organisation to receive one of the new electronic medical certificates will marvel at the technology – then print it out on a piece of paper and lock it in a filing cabinet.

The government's commitment to a ‘fit note’ was one of a raft of proposalsin its formal response to Dame Carol Black's review of the health of Britain's workforce. Championed by the CIPD, the important part of this initiative is that it shifts the focus of GPs’ advice to the work employees are still able to do, rather than the things they can’t do. It’s all part of an effort to cut the cost of absence, which Dame Carol Black estimated at around £100 billion annually – or according to the CIPD, an average of £666 per employee per year.

As well as shifting the emphasis from sickness to wellness, the government plans to introduce an electronic medical certificate, following Black’s suggestion that with patients’ permission, fit notes could be passed electronically from GPs to employers.

Getting rid of paper is always a good thing, of course – but in this case, we’re probably talking about postponing the start of the paper trail rather than eliminating it entirely. Absence management hasn’t typically been a top priority in HR IT investment, and many organisations still make do with a motley collection of paper forms, standalone spreadsheets, emails, and sticky notes on the boss’s computer. As a result, collecting absence information from each department and getting it into a central HR system is often a haphazard process, and information routinely gets lost.

Worse, it’s expensive as well as inefficient. If you rely on line managers submitting paper forms to HR, you probably also pay a small army of administrators to key in the data – each of whom, incidentally, is costing you £666 each year whenever they’re too sick to make it into the office.

Absence management software comes in different guises, but the idea is to digitise information as quickly as possible, get it to the people who need it, store it centrally – and act on it. Of course, automating the way you manage absence doesn’t cure sickness – my company might have the most sophisticated monitoring system in the world, but when I’ve got the flu, I’ve got the flu. But what a system can do is reduce your outlay, particularly for mid-sized and larger organisations.

For one thing, it gives you better information about long-term absence instances and allows you to make faster, more effective interventions. Likewise, if you collect accurate absence data, you can start to analyse trends. As Black argued, better recording and analysis of certification would enable employers “to identify patterns of absence within particular departments or roles and so deal with possible health problems in the workplace”.

Lastly, don’t forget the people who abuse the system. Without good records, it’s hard to spot when someone’s repeatedly throwing a sickie – and harder still to make a disciplinary case. Conversely, if I log onto my employee portal every morning and see a bright graphic showing the number of days lost to sickness across my organisation, I know my attendance is being monitored. That alone might act as a deterrent the next time I’m tempted to take another day off work with an imaginary dose of food poisoning…