What is an Employee Assistance Programme?
Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP) are employee benefit programmes . EAP are intended to help employees deal with personal problems that might adversely impact their work performance, health and wellbeing. EAP generally include assessment, short-term counselling and referral services for employees .
Mental health in the workplace
At any moment, over 15% of people in the UK and Ireland are suffering in work with symptoms of a mental health condition. That’s one in six of your people struggling—right now—to get through their workday, perhaps silently.
So it’s not a shock to learn that people with a mental health problem are three times more likely to take a long-term sickness absence, and that’s a clear problem for businesses—but there’s an answer…
The most successful employers in the public, private and non-profit sectors introduce a positive culture around mental health at work. Not only does it help their people, it also improves their organisation’s performance. Here’s how.
Why mental health is important to your business
When you’re open about the importance of mental health, you help your employees’ emotional, psychological and social wellbeing through five clear benefits:
- Work becomes a happier place to be, which helps you attract the best talent.
- Employees become much more motivated and their work output improves.
- Your best people stay loyal to both you and your business, reducing staff turnover.
- Employees take fewer days off with mental health symptoms and, if they are unwell, they stay off work like they should.
Boost mental health with an EAP
EAP is a useful benefit tool to complement your promotion of mental health wellbeing at work.
It’s a resource, accessible either over the phone, in person and online. It encourages individuals to take part in healthy behaviours and activities, offering sensitive and confidential counselling sessions to help people through life’s challenges.
Really making a difference
Employees are realizing more and more the importance of helping their staff by offering talking therapy to maintain a healthy workforce in the form of employment assistant programmes (EAP).
Each employer will agree what this looks like and create a package that suits them. This can consist of initial consult followed by an offer of sessions either by phone or face to face and or referral on to alternative or on going support.
It’s great that you are considering a line of support for staff members that will identify their need and prevent time taken off work.
When consulting with other EAP providers the recommended minimum is three sessions. Employers tend to offer between 3 and 6 sessions as part of a support plan for staff. This gives space for assessment and identifying immediate need with the idea of enabling the individual to put a plan in place that helps in the return to work or prevention of time off.
It maybe that the sessions provided by the employer are sufficient to meet an individuals need however the employer needs to take into consideration that they may need to continue to support a staff member to access therapy outside the time frame they have invested in.