Children are suffering from "pervasive anxiety" according to today's report based on research from Cambridge University's Community Soundings (pdf). However, other research published this week suggests that the pressure to be productive, and the associated stress, is not going to lessen when they grow up.

Business in the Community has just launched a new programme to promote health and wellbeing in the workplace. Its research shows that a third of workers feel their health is neglected at work, while six in 10 believe bosses consider staff merely as assets, and ones not much worth investing in.

Something approaching half of employees complain that they are discouraged from taking sick days when unwell or are put under pressure to do unpaid overtime. Well over half report suffering from stress; well over a third from depression; and close to a quarter of UK employees suffer from panic attacks.

The Chartered Management Institute adds to the picture by tracking the productivity of managers. This has fallen from around 45% of managers working well about two decades ago to around 36% today. The institute also believes that organisations tend to regard illness as a weakness, and hence the pressure to cover sickness up. And yet, in reality managers only take off three and a half days a year because they are unwell, whereas they work 40 days overtime.

Businesses are wising up to the losses that ill health at work represents to UK plc. Absenteeism increased in 2006 to 175m lost working days, costing the economy £13.4bn. Days off because of back pain alone, the result of poor posture in front of the PC costs UK plc £5bn a year. In the US they talk of "presenteeism", being physically present in the office, but effectively asleep at the desk. In other words, there is a strong business case for investing in the health and wellbeing of employees.

On a slightly different front, it can be for similarly altruistic reasons that companies deploy psychometric testing of staff. The idea behind such psychological profiling is that, with a mentor, employees can be clear about what they want from a career and empowered to act on it, explains Robert Myatt, a consultant at business psychologists Kaisen Consulting. They learn about themselves before they make decisions or have decisions made for them.

However, if some companies are starting to care, there is a darker side to the interest too. For one thing, some of the in-depth psychological profiling that employers deploy can be highly invasive.

If an individual shows signs that, say, they wouldn't be a good manager, the mentor will ask about whether they have, say, problems with authority; and then, perhaps, a difficult relationship with their father. Do employees really want this level of personal inspection on their record at work? It would seem to be an encroachment of the boundaries between someone's personal and professional life. There is perhaps a new phrase to add to the social lexicon: "nanny corporatism".

Alternatively, according to Clive Pinder, CEO of consultants Vielife, there is now ample data linking various risk indicators of an individual's health to productivity in the workplace. If someone's health risk indicators are high, their productivity will be low.

Pinder believes it can only be a matter of time before, in addition to asking prospective employees to take psychometric tests, they are asked to take health assessments too. An individual's chances of securing employment will be directly related to scoring well. To put it another way, smoking, obesity and depression will be quite as detrimental to employability as poor skills and training are now.

Such is the culture of hyper-measurement that apparently awaits our children. They are stressed out by taking tests today. Welcome to tomorrow.