Workplace stress, a widespread issue in modern professional environments, significantly increases the potential for errors and accidents. Timely and precise stress identification is vital for fostering a secure and efficient work environment. This research introduces an innovative, comparative-analysis framework designed for real-time stress detection, utilizing Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as a reliable physiological indicator. Unlike standard heart rate measurements, HRV offers a granular view of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) function, enabling accurate stress evaluation. We implement a comprehensive methodology incorporating a refined preprocessing stage—including the removal of outliers, feature selection, and data normalization—along with a comparative assessment of eight deep recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures. These include vanilla RNN, bidirectional RNN (BiRNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), standard Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Peephole LSTM, and Attention-based LSTM, applied to binary stress classification. Utilizing a dataset of 410,322 HRV records from the SWELL Knowledge Work (SWELL-KW) Dataset, our framework demonstrates exceptional performance, with the BiGRU architecture achieving a test accuracy of 99.51%. This study highlights the effectiveness of advanced temporal modeling and comparative analysis in creating robust stress detection systems for various occupational contexts, thereby enhancing workplace safety.