The introduction of EAPs has been welcomed whole-heartedly to the benefits market, providing support for both employers and employees. Paul Avis and Wojciech Dochan explain how EAPs can provide the necessary support required to maintain morale when employees are confronted with personal issues.
Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) have soared in popularity in recent years as companies act to protect themselves and their employees from the human and financial cost of stress and absenteeism. They have gone from being reactive crisis lines to proactive employee benefits, and now face their most exciting stage of evolution as they move into full ‘work life and wellness’ services. They can align brilliantly with other benefits such as Group Income Protection (IP) that include rehabilitation delivered by occupational health to provide both employer and employee benefits.
Employee morale and performance are highest when individuals are free from personal issues. However, everyone experiences personal issues from time to time and an EAP alongside such products as IP and private medical insurance (PMI) can serve as a strong resource to have in place. If combined with such products, offering EAPs may result in additonal benefits for employers and employees including lower medical costs, reduced turnover of absenteeism and higher employee productivity and morale.
They are intended to help employees deal with problems that might adversely impact their work performance, health, and well-being, ranging from child and career problems to personal or health-related issues. Therefore, they play a vital role in helping an employer to manage their personnel and ensure that their welfare is kept a priority.
The scrutiny of what value EAPs are providing to a business is often overlooked. EAP providers can bring together employee health, wellbeing and engagement strategies, which not only reinforce the core EAP business but can help drive the wellness and productivity strategy of an organisation. This creates a virtuous circle, where return on investment (ROI) assessments are complimented by stakeholder management and engagement HR, compensation and benefits teams can both act and react with clear, quantified objectives that are based on detailed, comprehensive management information from the EAP provider.
Specific examples of this includes vocational rehabilitation dovetailing with an EAP to help reduce the incidence and longevity of claims, or EAP supporting employees following diagnosis of a critical incident with resources such as CDs on sleep and printed guides on resilience and working through times of change. In all cases, an improved employee experience of becoming sick or disabled is the aim with potential, resultant reductions in claims and therefore premiums. Having established the importance of EAP and other products to the aligned health benefits, the objective is to get meaningful data to employers.
Alleviating costs
Combining a group IP or PMI policy with an EAP provides a high perceived value benefit that can help alleviate costs of staff absence due to stress and other issues. EAPs slot neatly alongside their PMI and occupational health packages, and companies appreciate the opportunity to buy an integrated employee healthcare package from a single source. But brokers do have an important role, helping employees connect PMI, occupational health and EAP services, and should therefore look beyond profitability.
An employer should position an EAP service as a positive resource. It is important to highlight that an employee does not have to be ‘stressed out,’ or ‘in crisis’ to use the service but can use it to proactively manage their day-to-day life. For example, in addition to counselling support, EAPs offer guidance on locating elder and child care placements, legal support and health information and, if offered, alongside PMI can offer additional support to critical illness.
When promoting an EAP to employees, it is essential to ensure that the communication mix is not only positive but relevant. This is based on what can be described as demographic (generational and sexual) competence: younger males may not like traditional EAP helplines and face-to-face counselling but are comfortable with seeking online information and counselling. So having access to these, and online self-assessment tools, should not only be on an employer’s wish list when defining the service but also publicised when that service goes live.
Broadening the agenda
Broaden the agenda with the EAP provider, as many now offer advanced employee health and wellbeing programmes including combined PMI or IP. These can include health risk assessments to complement physical health screening programmes and specific health coaching programmes, e.g. on stress, weight, tobacco cessation, etc. These can be based on outbound telephone and online call support or outsourced absence notifications backed by management software.
The availability of support material is imperative to the employee. Following a telephone call, up to 20 per cent of employees will request printed materials on a range of subjects from managing teenagers to budget guides to dealing with a terminal illness. Manager guides and support are often overlooked by employers whose responsibility it is to check that both the quantity and quality of printed materials are correct, and that such materials are available online.
As well as having these materials, employers should have a clear, rolling communications plan. This could include monthly updates scheduled for employees and regular online updates (a weekly poll sometimes works) on areas of interest. It is important to follow up on on-site employee launches to ensure the information learnt is not forgotten. The employee should also be able to subscribe to regular alerts on areas of interest to them.
Management reports are provided as part of an EAP service and employers should ensure they take action on them. With dynamic reporting software becoming available, employers can highlight hot spots and specifically target remedial campaigns. Line management training can be provided into how to spot and manage stress, which could potentially lead to the introduction of flexible working and team building days. Combining management information from a variety of suppliers is recommended and joint supplier meetings, such as those between the Unum Premier team and the Ceridian Account Management team, provide cohesive insights into health challenges and remedies.
The key to success is to assess the impact of the interventions and put a cost/benefit analysis in place. It is important to ask questions such as ‘are work pressure issues declining and are employees becoming more productive as a result?’ For example, a reduction in mental health claims for group income protection (GIP) could be aligned with a team resilience programme and this in turn should lead to reduced premiums because of fewer claims. Therefore, wherever possible, employers should undertake a return on investment (ROI) calculation to convince your colleagues in finance departments that it works to invest to save.
Creating a corporate dashboard can help to bring all management information together. The health risk assessments, current EAP usage, medical and group IP, and medical insurance claims information can quantify the current employer situation as a starting point. Ongoing monitoring of EAP usage with remedial actions, tracking employee changes, goal attainment via the online health tools, and gaining information from outsourced absence notifications can help an employer identify absence reasons. The, ‘quantify, act, assess (success or failure)’ model can be fully costed with a resultant positive/negative ROI. After all, how can you manage unless you can measure?
Providing staff with access to employee benefits, such as an EAP alongside other products, is a particularly effective way of helping to reduce overall staff absence costs and improve efficiency. It means that employees can seek advice at an early stage before their worries may start to impact on their health and work performance.
While the emphasis of UK employers has been very much on the physical aspect of employee health, it seems that one cannot separate mental wellbeing from this. The physical manifestations of mental health issues is a topic in its own right, but the new breed of EAP providers combine the two in their approach. This has never been truer than in the current environment where personal stress, organisational uncertainty, redundancy and financial worries abound. The days of the problem-reactive, counselling-oriented EAP are over and such services will have to adapt or disappear. Augmenting this new mood of positive employee engagement from EAPs is the potential for joint working with insurance products and service providers.
Paul Avis is business development manager at Ceridian and Wojciech Dochan is head of commercial marketing at Unum
