Offering counselling for employees helps reduce stress and absenteeism rates, research by Capita has found.
The research comes after the recent report by the chief medical officer into the present state of mental health services. Capita analysed data on more than 3,500 people who had used advice and counselling services during 2013.
Karen Woodley, business development director in Capita Health and Wellbeing said: "The impact of stress on employees can be profound and long lasting if it's not tackled effectively."
The report found that mental illness led to the loss of 70 million working days last year - up 24% since 2009 - and that those off work for more than 6 months have only a 20% chance of returning to work in the next 5 years. This suggests that mental illness is both a risk factor for unemployment and an outcome of it.
Woodley warned "individuals can get trapped in a cycle where their mental illness creates and maintains their inability to work which, in turn, worsens their mental health. Therefore it is important to offer support to help people to return to work or keep them in it, if appropriate."
She continued: "And, as our research shows, offering early access to counselling and information support services can often stop a problem from escalating to a point where the employee then becomes absent in the first place. Our research found that 54% of employees who have used employee assistance programmes to deal with stress say they would have taken days, weeks or months off work without it."
Of employees who had reported being stressed 72% were irritable, 77% were losing confidence, 72% were sleeping poorly and they were working more slowly. Following counselling these rates fell, to 31%, 26% and 27% respectively.
Woodley added, "And counselling can deal not just with the here and now but provide longer term benefits. Before counselling just 11% of employees were satisfied with their lives, but afterwards this increased more than five-fold to 59%.
"Employee assistance programmes therefore benefit both employee and employer - they help employees deal with the sort of life events that affect most of us sooner or later and ensure that performance issues and absence, and therefore the cost of managing such absences, are reduced."
