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Britain is one of the most stressed-out nations on earth. Every year, it dispenses around £6.5bn in incapacity benefit, of which 40% relates to mental health and stress at work. It has the longest working hours in the developed world (surpassing even those of the US this year, according to the UN). And it has some of the lowest levels of employee-satisfaction in Europe; a recent survey of 14 million workers across the continent ranked it above only two other countries.

As if you didn't know already, stress is killing our productivity, as well as our wellbeing. This was the core message delivered to the London Business Forum by Professor Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University Management School and author of Stress: A Brief History. Our HR directors have been aware of the problem for years, but it nevertheless seems to be getting steadily worse.

"Workplace stress now represents two out of every three days of sickness absence [in the UK]," Professor Cooper said, citing recent data from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. "It's passing backache and musculo-skeletal diseases, no matter what survey you look at." To some extent, this isn't surprising. As our manufacturing base has declined, so our workforce has naturally come to suffer more from mental problems rather than physical ones. However, the adverse impact of stress is being felt "in every sector and [is] increasing every year."

Business people tend to think of stress as largely a public-sector problem, Cooper said. But although civil servants take more sick leave than their private-sector counterparts, "that's only because, I think... they can go off sick and not necessarily lose their job in the long run. In the private sector, if you're consistently off ill, most companies [will put you into] an 'absence management programme'." (The best euphemism Cooper ever heard for a stress-related sacking, he said, was "icing," derived from the acronym ICE, or "involuntary career interruption".)

"Private sector people may suffer more in my view from 'presenteeism' rather than absenteeism," he concluded. "In other words, they're frightened to lose their jobs so they come to work even if they're feeling ill."

Fortunately, we now have a better understanding than ever of the aggravating factors behind workplace stress, he said. For example:

The role you play

How clear is it? And how much control do you have over it? "The science says the more you feel in control, the less you'll get ill," Cooper explained. When he carried out a long-term study of the stress suffered by air-traffic controllers at Manchester Airport, he found their highly variable workloads, shift-working and training burdens were good predictors of heart disease.

It's important to realise that "underload" can be just as harmful as overload, he added. "I once did a study of international interpreters working for the United Nations, the EU and Nato - the top 1500 interpreters in the world. [We] found that most had PhDs, and that, by doing the relatively low-level job of interpreting, they did not feel valued... The stress was not from the interpreting - they loved doing that - but from the feeling that the people they were interpreting for treated them like machines."

Your working relationships

Stress is usually the result of friction with other people. And by far your most important relationship in this regard is the one you have with your boss. "Bosses are really fundamental to our health because they're surrogate parental figures," Cooper suggested. "Unfortunately, bosses in Western companies tend to manage by fault-finding rather than by praise and reward."

Your boss is the only person who can give you the control and autonomy you crave. It is he or she who dictates whether your organisation has a long-hours culture. It's therefore unsurprising that research shows "the boss" to be the major source of stress for many people. "If I were to fix any one thing in a working environment, I would try to fix that thing," Cooper said.

The culture of your organisation

Bosses are also responsible for creating and managing organisational culture - whether it's trusting, caring, supportive, involving, participative, consultative or simply based on "command and control".

It's important for them to remember that one of the reasons we come to work every day is to socialise, Cooper argued. After all, in a highly networked, service-based economy, we don't really need to commute to the same buildings via the same stations every morning at all. "We're doing this because we want to go into work and talk about the film we saw last night, the problems we're having with our teenagers, our perceptions of Fred the boss," Cooper said. "We go to work partly to meet our social needs."

Opportunities for career development

Underpromotion, overpromotion and a lack of job-security are all major contributors to stress levels. It's an obvious point, but one that's about to become more pressing as the global economy enters a period of downturn. "I'm not going to use the R-word," Cooper said. "But there's a lot of job insecurity out there and I suspect stress levels are going to rise substantially."

Work-life balance

Two out of three families in the UK are now either "two-earner families" or single-parent families, Cooper pointed out. "We've had the longest working hours [in Europe] for at least 10 years," and now the UN says we have the longest in the developed world. Unless we redress this balance, we won't make serious inroads into our stress problem.

So, what steps should organisations take to reduce stress levels among their workers? One thing's for sure, Cooper said, "doing a mantra at lunchtime won't solve problems of an autocratic management style, problems of a glass ceiling for women, problems of a lack of clarity of role, problems of a long working-hours culture or all the other factors we know cause ill-health". Meditation has its place, he said, along with a good diet and exercise, but far more effective is "primary intervention". This means isolating the specific underlying causes of an organisational malaise through psychometric evaluation, then wiping those causes out.

The case study Cooper used to illustrate this methodology was that of Somerset County Council, which recently called in his team to address problems of high sickness-absence and increased litigation from employees. An audit of all 17,000 employees in the social-work department showed the problem was centred on two types of employee: those dealing with mental health in adults, and those dealing with children and families. "We used a psychometric tool [that determines] wellbeing and health, which is benchmarked against clinical measures, to tell us which groups we should look at," Cooper explained.

A similar instrument was then used to determine specifically what was causing the most stress for this group of workers. The basic answer was work-overload. Then Cooper and his team divided the workers into focus groups. For each group, they began their discussions by saying: "This is what the psychometric tells us is your problem. Is it accurate? And if so, what is your solution to it? Because we're not going to impose a solution on you."

"Everyone thought the groups would respond by saying they needed 100 more social workers," Cooper said. "That would be typical, right? But they didn't say that at all. They said: 'Our problem is that we don't have enough senior social-work managers. In other words, we don't have anybody telling us how to prioritise our workload." Their surprisingly modest solution to the problem was to recruit 22 new senior managers - a step that required an investment of £500,000 but that ended up saving the council £1.9m within one year. More importantly, Cooper said, "sickness-absence days were totally wiped out and continue to decline."

Cooper concluded his presentation by quoting Studs Turkel, a social anthropologist who recently travelled around the US asking people how they felt about their jobs. The resulting book, called Working, includes the following passage: "Work should be about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying." This, Cooper said, with special emphasis to the HR directors in the room, "is our challenge."