Report author Rob Briner, senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Birkbeck College, London, says employers are right to take seriously how job conditions affect workers' wellbeing. Briner says there is no strong evidence of a link between job-related stress and ill health. Most studies of work stress rely on self-reporting and reveal nothing about cause and effect. Such legal action by employees and driven by an explosion of interest in stress, an increasing number of companies are investing in a wide range of programmes to tackle the problem. Some employers believe stress could become the asbestosis of the modern workplace.
People pathologise ordinary responses to work, like getting angry or depressed.
If you go on a course that says these things are killing you, it could make things worse. Large employers increasingly offer counselling help lines, but there is almost no evidence that such counselling affects job performance, he says. The most useful approach should be job redesign, where workloads are reduced, employees are given greater control or their roles are made clearer. To make job redesign more effective, employers must first be sure that a particular working condition causes problems for a significant number of employees and that it can be changed without creating new problems. Its 5.05pm, I'm late.