Employees who have “I hate my boss syndrome” should not be signed off sick with a mental health condition, according to the head of a government workplace review.

Sir Charlie Mayfield said he was concerned some problems are being “over-medicalised” when they could be solved in the office.

The former John Lewis chairman has been appointed by Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, to come up with plans to stop workers leaving their jobs because of poor health. His report is due this autumn.

One in five people of working age have a health condition that affects their job and there are 2.8 million people inactive due to ill health — up from 2.1 million since before the Covid pandemic although the numbers had been rising for several years.

Mayfield said: “The last thing I wish to do is trivialise [mental health conditions] but I agree that things do get over-medicalised.

“That’s not to say there aren’t medical issues that need to be dealt with through proper clinical medical interventions, but there’s a lot more that can be done through the workplace and through encouraging discussion and relationships and processes that encourage that.

“It might be better to say: ‘What’s making you anxious?’ Because then we can do something about that. And how do you deal with it if you’ve got [an employee with a] ‘I hate my boss syndrome’? We can say ‘Is it the case that your boss is hateful’, in which case, that’s probably an issue that we should figure out how we deal with.

“Or is it that your boss is quite legitimately doing what they should be doing, which is challenging you and raising issues of poor performance and so this is a question about helping you to realise that it’s not hateful behaviour, that’s what bosses are meant to do.”

He said when employees are signed off, bosses should routinely contact them to help support their return to work.

He said sick notes create an “impregnable barrier” between employer and employee, with bosses often too scared of contacting staff for fear of “causing offence”. He claims this makes it harder for people to return to work after a sickness absence.

Mayfield, 58, said lessons could be learned from the Netherlands, where there is a mandatory six-week intervention meeting requiring employee, employer and occupational health to agree a return-to-work plan with two-week monitoring cycles.

“You quite often will have a situation where someone gets a fit note and they’re signed off work for a month and then they get an extension and another extension and they’re taken further and further away [from the workplace],” he said. “What we know statistically is the longer you’re away from work, the harder it is to get back and the less likely you are to do so. There are some fairly simple things that you could do. You could say, ‘It’s not OK to be out of touch.’ It should become normal that people are contacted when they’re off sick.”

Mayfield said some organisations already do this but most do not. “There is a fear amongst individuals who’ve got health conditions to disclose those things because they worry about discrimination … But there’s also a tremendous amount of fear amongst employers who are fearful at one level of causing offence,” he said. “A line manager doesn’t want to offend somebody about something which is personal to them by saying the wrong thing.

“I’ve met so many people who have said they were off work for three months and didn’t have a single call.”

He said “keeping in touch days” like those used by women on maternity leave, could help solve the disconnection between employer and employee and help improve return-to-work outcomes.

Mayfield is also looking at ways to boost participation, and believes flexibility is key particularly among the over-50s.

“It’s not just saying, ‘I want to be able to work three days a week and never on a Friday,’” he said. “Mostly it’s about the moment, [by saying, for example], ‘Next Tuesday I’ve got an appointment and I need to be able to go to it. Because if I can go to it, I can find out what’s going wrong and I can get some plan put in place to make it better.’ If that’s discouraged, then you never have the appointment and you just carry on with this issue and it gets acute, at which point you have to leave work completely or you have a longer-term absence which you could otherwise have avoided.”