There’s almost three decades of robust research and academic study on workplace stress, and the jury is in. If your people have a problem with stress in the workplace, the problem is almost always with the workplace, not its employees.

We have to change the conversation, particularly the conversation being had in the popular press on the topic of workplace stress, and start holding our employers accountable for the workplace stress that they have created and subject their employees to.

When we shift the burden of dealing with workplace stress to the employees, we are simply giving their organisation a get out of goal free card. Our occupational health, safety and welfare legislation in almost all jurisdictions makes no real distinction between the physical and the mental health of our employees, yet if an employer caused illness or injury to its workforce at the same frequency and intensity that they impact on their mental health, our courts would be full of senior managers and executives being prosecuted for the harm they permitted on their watch.

We need to fix this insidious problem of workplace stress as it is having a huge toll on society, but first we need to see it for what it is. It is a direct consequence of a way an organisation is designed, operated, managed and lead, and the sources of stress will not be addressed by telling employees to chill out, toughen up, change their outlook or adopt other inward focussed strategies. The sources of stress only get addressed when an organisation accepts it accountabilities, seeks to understand the complex dynamics that are at play, and commits to eliminating, mitigating or reducing the sources of stress it has created, at an organisational level.

But first we have to stop telling our already stressed out workforces that they are the problem and they need to be the solution, and start holding our employers to account for workplace stress.

Alan Whitley