Employee Assistance Programmes have been highly commoditised and packaged in recent years but Paul Avis, corporate development manager at Ceridian, explores what services are on offer and confirms that you still get what you pay for. Employer benefit, rather than the employee benefit, is the future!
As you step into the clear waters of the Caribbean, the immediate cooling effect, the volume of marine life and the sumptuous, gentle waves that caress you immediately lift the spirit. You spend a week doing this and suddenly you are used to it: you see the same fish, the water temperature never changes and you are getting used to the island heat. And this is the problem: many employers do not value EAPs, have had or are sold EAPs that do not evolve or change with their needs, communications become stale and account management meetings are little more than statistically-based sales pitches often getting clients into a comfortable, but dull, routine. Back in the Caribbean, you realise that the best way to remedy the swimming/snorkelling experiential familiarity is to push the boundaries and you bravely decide to go Scuba diving. Suddenly a whole new world opens up: brighter corals, bigger, more interesting fish, crannies of lobsters and turtles abound and you wonder why you never did it before. And that is the point of this article: on the surface all EAPs may look the same but the deeper you dive into them the more they can offer and the better experience you, your employees and your organisation will have.
What is an Employee Assistance Programme and what should it contain?
A traditional EAP service has two main components: 24-hour/365 days telephone-based support for employees on a wide range of issues from harassment to legal advice. In addition, should the telephone call indicate a need for a higher level of assistance, and then face-to-face counselling sessions can be arranged. An employer should view an EAP as a short-term, solution-focused counselling proposition with face-to-face limits routinely set at six to eight sessions. Critical incident defusion support is also available and following an incident (e.g. a death in the workplace), a team of counsellors can be assembled to offer immediate support for those involved. This could be incorporated into disaster contingency plans and helps to reduce incidence of problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The use of an EAP may also help to lower Employers’ Liability premiums as the likelihood of a successful work-related stress claim is much reduced by the presence of an EAP service (Lady Justice Hale review of February 2002). Further case law is refining what is meant by this (e.g. Barber vs. Somerset in 2004, which indicates merely using an EAP is not enough by itself and that it has to be actively promoted and used by employees). As a rule of thumb, most EAP providers express the view that a well promoted, 3+ session face-to-face model will go a long way to meeting the duty of care requirement.
The more advanced suppliers are now moving into the Wellness arena by offering self-assessment tools, e.g. stress and work/life balance, health encyclopedias/information and online personal health risk assessments which can compliment physical health screening. At the top end, executive EAPs are being offered which provide coaching as well as personal counselling and, while embryonic, they too are being developed as components in an employee health and well-being strategy. Further stages of EAP evolution are also attempting to provide an employee engagement position. For example, specific programmes based on outbound as well as inbound calls and online support for weight, stress and smoking cessation are becoming available. Health risk assessments can cover areas such as alcohol/drink driving, eating, sun, stress, weight, BMI/waist and hips, exercise and activity, age, smoking, self-medication, blood pressure, cholesterol, personal health/disease risk management/well man/well woman, etc. Family profiles can be acknowledged in this process as well as personal risk identification. The potential for goal setting and personal aims here is endless!
Management Information and ROI: the Employer EAP?
However, the next stage of development will be even more exciting as the shift will move from what is an inexpensive but worthwhile benefit to becoming the most important HR tool in an employer’s armoury. This shift means that the EAP will become an employer as well as an employee benefit. Initially this will be achieved by real-time, online, dynamic reporting. This will profile exactly what the service is being used for and by whom and compare in-house departments and other benchmarks. While such knowledge is extremely valuable to an employer the reactive, malleable nature of the real-time reports does not stop there and they aim to not only identify but more importantly remedy any specific issues. For example, a 100 per cent increase in calls to the EAP about work pressures in one department could result in a promotion aimed at reducing stress, training for line managers and even the implementation of flexible working. Communication tools such as stress relieving toys, self-help guides, CD/DVDs with breathing and other stress relieving areas could be supplied and even team building exercises! Having invested the time and money in the remedial actions EAP usage can then be assessed to determine the effectiveness of such expenditure. With artificial intelligence backing such systems, ROI calculations can be made and, as data grows, modelling of areas such as productivity, employee satisfaction and likelihood of employee issues can be assessed (and ideally prevented). The potential for an employer to really influence employee behaviour in a positive way has never been greater and the shift from traditional management reports to interactive, participative and proactive ones should not be underestimated.
While this major advance in EAP support and ROI is the backbone of the core service, more advanced suppliers are developing even more data-driven, hungry models for employers by building ‘corporate dashboards.’ Health risk assessment data can benchmark employee health as a start point by identifying pre-disease pools, numbers of stressed or overweight employees and then benchmark these and cost the impact that they are having on a business. Tracking employee changes over time, recommending access to specific health programmes (such as weight loss) and targeting remedial actions are all time and cost activities whose impacts can be clearly quantified. Having identified and assessed the health issues, both financially and in terms of content, EAP usage provides information and real-time reporting and action on this begins the virtuous circle. Outcomes such as reductions in sickness absence, private medical, group income protection and employer liability claims ultimately provide the success or failure of such initiatives but at all stages, from the different fragments, ROI calculations prove the business case. Putting all of this data in front of an employer can really shape strategy and provide bottom line results information. For example, the EAP real-time reports, the health risk assessment situational report, the specific programme report, absence statistics, insurance claims/usage reports could all be made available at the same time and all have ROI measures attached to them. This nirvana is already available and ironically is being driven from the least expensive service/benefit – the EAP!
Summary
Against this backdrop of innovation and evolution, the EAP cost is minimal when compared to private medical, pension, group income protection and other benefit and service costs and so many employers do not demand too much of their providers but they should! As a result, it is often viewed as a poor relation to these costs and benefits and many organisations do not devote enough time to it. But a paradigm shift is happening: HR can now prove from data and ROI tools that interventions and proactive actions can add value to a business by increasing bottom line performance, by reducing staff turnover, increasing productivity and by establishing a virtuous circle of reducing insurance costs. Based on this information and by establishing that an organisation’s best assets are its people, there is a real opportunity for an HR professional to sit at the top decision-making table in organisations. I started this article by suggesting that get what you pay for from an EAP and by taking you to the Caribbean. I could have taken you to an African mine, as the principle is the same: the deeper you mine the bigger the diamonds you get. Between the Caribbean and a diamond mine, I know where I would prefer to be. And that is the point: are you where you need and want to be with your EAP provision, health and wellness strategy, insurance costs and career?
Paul Avis, corporate development manager, Ceridian UK, 0800 733337
