Workplace stress is usually explained by workload, and the evidence points somewhere else.
Large find that the strongest is the combination of high demand and low .
A surgeon and a call-centre operator may work equally hard, and their health outcomes differ sharply.
Control means deciding the order of tasks, the method and when to take a break.
Those are cheap to grant and are frequently removed for reasons of measurement rather than of production.
A worker is easier to manage and measurably less healthy over twenty years.
Support is the third element and interacts with the other two.
High demand with high and good support produces engagement rather than .
That combination describes most work that people describe as the best they have done.
Individual interventions have a poor record against structural ones.
Courses in and mindfulness produce small short-lived effects and are popular because they require no change to the work.
Trials that changed the schedule or the produced larger effects and were adopted far less often.
The explanation is not a mystery: one intervention names the organisation as the problem.
Managers are themselves a risk group, since they hold demand from above and very little of it.
Any programme that treats stress as an employee characteristic will keep measuring the wrong variable.