Congrats to Business Week for their story and what struck me as one of the more clever headlines in awhile, Shirking Working: The War on Hooky. Among other things the article points out how businesses are going to software analysis to determine when and more importantly why, people aren't showing up for work when they are supposed to.
And as anyone but certain bosses might think, the problem doesn't always lie with the employees. For example:
At one manufacturing company, a group of employees loathed their manager's style. The sentiment went unnoticed by the C-suite until a software program created by Convergys started scouring the department's data and found it had a high absence rate compared with other units. At that point, Convergys performed an "intervention" with the manager's employees: confidential focus groups where the workers could vent. Once the company attended to the problems, attendance rose.