Hi Sarah, Both sound really interesting but maybe you could get really specific and investigate whether there is evidence for a relationship between managers approach to dealing with these issues and the actual levels of sickness or performance in your organisation or particular teams? eg all the managers who were super proactive have more performance cases but higher performance. Or those with unmanaged sickness cases lead to longer average sickness, less returns to work, higher turnover ?Are you planning on using quantitative evidence or something more qualitative? It is really hard to narrow things down when everything is so interesting!

In reply to Kay:

Thank you for this Kay . The idea part is giving me a headache! I wanted to use both forms of data, but yes qualitative research.

Capability? 2 strands - 1) Capability - Performance and 2) Capability - Attendance. Both need addressing in a structured and systematic way but neither of them are disciplinary matters.