All business and management research is carried out within a particular context. As such, it is very rare to find a project with which there are no ethical or political concerns/issues. Sometimes the topics are innocuous, and concerns are lessened, but because absenteeism is an issue that costs organizations and economies huge sums of money (e.g., according to Integrated Benefits Institute, workplace absenteeism cost US employers $575 billion in 2019 [IBI, 2020]), this is an important and emotive topic. Another difficulty, when dealing with absenteeism specifically is that there are moral issues in terms of fairness and honesty. Also, there are many reasons why a person might be absent, some of which are outside of their control and others that they can control. Reliably distinguishing between these is very difficult. 

In any case, you set out to consider what ethical issues there might be and how you might deal with them, bearing in mind that sometimes risk cannot be eliminated, but can usually be managed.

The things you initially think about are as follows:

• Can individuals be uniquely identified? How? By whom? What might the implications be if individuals with particularly poor absence records were identified? How can you avoid giving information about individuals to management if requested?
• Could the media become aware of the study and how might the public feel about the results? How might the employees, management, shareholders, potential/future employees feel about the results? Might they act differently because of them?
• If controversial findings emerge, (e.g., women are for more likely to be absent than men, workers aged from 25–34 are twice as likely to be absent as those in the 45–54 age category), what should/will/can the employer do?
• What if one particular work group has very high absenteeism rates, does this reflect on the manager of that group? If so, how? Is this fair? Could this impact their career progression? If that manager does have poor leadership skills, will they see it as a learning opportunity, or will they blame the employees and become an even more difficult manager to work for?
• What if an employee who has had significant levels of absence hears that the study is happening and panics about the outcome for them personally?
• What if a union or employee representative group becomes involved and is very unhappy about this research being carried out?
• What if employees don’t want you to use their data for research purposes, given that it was not primarily gathered for that purpose?
• How do you ensure that you safely manage the data that you hold so that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands?
• What if the HR manager feels that the findings of this study will show them in a poor light and wants to obstruct access to the data?

As you can see from the above questions, the potential issues are manifold. And if you thought further about it, you would surely find more. Clearly, these issues are not relevant to your ESC project (as it is a fictional organization with fictional data). However, it is still important to consider what ethical/political issues might arise if you were researching in a real organization, to give you a sense of the types of issues you’d need to consider.