What kind of increase in productivity does just not showing up provide? People should be able to take sick days, personal days, mental health days, but disappearing should have raised concern from team members to see if that person is OK.
I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work.
There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest.
If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t).
Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.