While Mr Briner is sceptical about the nature of stress and the multi-million-pound industry that has grown up around it over the past 20 years, he does accept that work can be harmful on some levels.
Technically, stress is a meaningless term. No one suffers from stress per se - they suffer from anxiety disorders or depression. Stress has been pathologised as the individual's reaction to work rather than being understood as a symptom of problems in the organisation.
He believes responsibility for stress has fallen squarely on employers in recent years - hence the record number of court cases - but the recent ruling makes clear that employees have a duty to inform employers about their stress and, ultimately, take some responsibility for managing it. Mr Briner says standards will help both sides to identify the components of work-related stress and encourage them to work together to find ways to reduce it.
Colin Mackay, principal psychologist of the HSE, says the executive chose to develop management standards rather than focusing on employee assistance or counselling programmes because it wanted to adopt a preventive approach to stress management. "We wanted to identify and understand the characteristics of work that cause health problems," he says.
Factors such as high workload, lack of control and inadequate support are known to damage people's health, he says, and by analysing various stressors and how they interact, it will be possible to draft a set of universal standards.