Work can be stressful and people generally have their good and bad days. The public policy towards stress at work starts off from the wrong assumptions – that the offices, shops and factories are likely to make people ill, according to Dr. David Wainwright, an expert at the University of Bath.

He said the guidelines to reduce stress at work just released by the National Institute for Clinical and Health Excellence (NICE) will do more harm than good.

The Government body says that 13.7 million working days are lost each year as a result of work-related mental illness and that simple measures such as giving positive feedback and allowing flexible hours and home working could significantly improve the wellbeing of staff and help reduce the cost of absenteeism.

But according to Dr Wainwright, people need to start from the standpoint that work is actually good for us.

"We know that people in work do a lot better than people who are unemployed in terms of mental health," said Dr. Wainwright from the School of Health.

"We're relying on an outdated engineering metaphor of a metal bar pressing down on people with a force until they break."We shouldn't treat negative emotions as an illness. If you have a bad day at the office, it doesn't mean that it's going to damage your mental health. It's just part of life."

Dr Wainwright did, however, acknowledge that people had legitimate sickness problems in the workplace.He said: "People clearly continue to have emotional problems relating to work, but defining them in terms of work stress and developing interventions based on this approach does not appear to be working.

"It's time for a radically different approach in which we abandon the concept of work stress in favour of a new model which focuses on the social causes of resilience and illness."

"The problem is that many work stress interventions simply reinforce the perception that work is fundamentally bad for our health and well-being, when there is actually considerable evidence that work is good for us.

"Certainly, people encounter hardship at work and this can give rise to negative emotions, but rather than trying to avoid these emotions through stress avoidance or stress management interventions, it would be better to channel our emotions into activities that really do turn bad jobs into good jobs."

He said that many questionnaires "amplified" the problems they were trying to solve by encouraging people to report how stressed they felt.

Earlier this year Dr Wainwright launched a region-wide project that aims to cut sickness absence by 25 per cent by improving well-being at work.

The project will bring together businesses from across the South West – including the troubled Royal Mail – with academics from the universities of Bath, West of England and Exeter to develop initiatives for tackling the problem, which costs firms in the region up to £1.67 billion per year.

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The source: The Bath Chronicle

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