There’s a subtle but important difference between trying to reduce stress, and trying to promote well-being.

A lawyer friend was walking through a client’s offices recently and came across a group of staff being given head and shoulder massages, with another group patiently waiting in line for their turn.  The client said proudly that this was to help reduce stress.  My friend, being of a cynical nature (did I say he was a lawyer?) wondered whether it wouldn’t be better for the staff if they were able to spend a little less time at work.

The story came to mind when reading the National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines on Promoting Well-Being in the Workplace. The title is revealing, I think.  For once here is a focus on well-being rather than stress, a subtle but significant distinction – it is the difference between light and dark, positive and negative.  When we place stress in the foreground we try to find ways of reducing or eliminating its causes.  Well-being, however, means we begin to search for ways of making work a more meaningful and enjoyable experience.

The report’s authors conclude that mental ill health costs the country a staggering £28bn per annum.  As you might expect, some of the costs are associated with sickness absence and staff turnover.  Together though they amounted to only 40% of the total.  The big ticket item was presenteeism – which was estimated to be one and a half times the cost of absenteeism, and which is most prevalent amongst senior management.

You might disagree with some the financial  assumptions being made (no report these days ever has cost savings of less than a billion it seems) but the sums involved are large by any standards.

The guidelines tell us what organisations need to do to improve mental well-being including: ensuring a sense of equity, justice and fairness in the way people are treated; flexible working; good line management where people are developed, receive feedback and feel supported.

This is all sensible, practical advice. But it means that we have to examine the organisation’s culture, its processes and management style in a fundamental way –rather than applying superficial if highly colourful sticking plasters to the problems.  If we don’t do this, the queues for the Indian head massage won’t be getting any smaller.

Professor Binna Kandola OBE