How an Employee Assistance Program Can Help Your People and Your Productivity

By Mickey Matran / October 21, 2014 / Uncategorized No Comments

If you have an employee who’s facing challenges at home — such as grieving the death of a family member, experiencing marital troubles or struggling with substance abuse — those problems might come to work with them. People who are dealing with issues in their personal lives can hardly be expected to forget about them when they come to work, but that can affect the quality of their work and their productivity.

“You can fire an underperforming employee and retrain someone for the position, but you pay a lot of money for that,” says Steve Bayliss of Hidalgo Health Associates. “You could ignore the problem, but that’s not good for morale.” Alternately, you can use an employee assistance program, which is a short-term counseling program that’s designed to help employees get back on their feet so they can get back to work and become productive again without incurring insurance claims.

Research Shows EAPs Help

According to a study by Federal Occupational Health, organizations that offer EAPs report a decrease in unplanned absences and tardiness by an average of 1.5 days per case. In addition, people who reported that it was difficult to do their jobs properly because of emotional problems before participating in an EAP showed a 73 percent increase in productivity after using the service.

Some of the issues EAPs can help employees work through include relationship issues, substance abuse, grief and loss counseling, stress management, communication skills, compulsive gambling, smoking cessation, family counseling and mental health screening.

In addition, EAP providers may also offer seminars or counseling on sexual harassment, violence in the workplace, and critical incident stress debriefing, which is a kind of specialized counseling for employees who have witnessed a traumatic event at work.

Some Advantages of Using an EAP

EAPs have several advantages, Bayliss says. First, if employees are referred to insurance programs to work on their issues, they have to deal with co-pays and deductibles, and that could also affect the premiums the company pays. With an EAP, employees pay nothing, and employer costs are greatly reduced.

Insurance may not even cover some issues, such as grief counseling or relationship counseling, if there’s no associated medical condition such as depression. “If you’ve got theses issues, it can really affect your productivity,” Bayliss says. And another advantage is that EAPs typically offer a quicker turnaround for appointments times than medical doctors or psychologists.

Training is Key to Making the Most of an EAP

It’s important for managers to understand how an EAP works so they can recommend it when the time is right, Bayliss says. “It’s like a spare tire on your car — you don’t think about it until you really need it.” But around 20 percent of a company’s employees are coming to work with some kind of issue at home, he says, and training managers to recognize the signs of employee problems and to make a referral is essential to using an EAP.

If managers don’t step in, he says, the employee’s performance may get so bad that the situation is referred to HR. While employers can’t force employees to use an EAP or threaten to fire them if they don’t go, employers can of course fire employees for poor performance. But it’s important to make it clear to employees that referral to an EAP is not a disciplinary action.

“It’s a helping hand, not a punishment,” Bayliss says. In addition, EAPs are totally confidential and must follow HIPAA regulations.

Getting employees back on their feet before their performance suffers helps both them and the company. If your organization doesn’t have an EAP, consider adding one. If it does have one, ensure employees know about it so they can use it should the need arise.

If you’d like more information about employee assistance programs and how to set one up at your organization, contact us. We’re here to help.

HR Solutions is a human resources outsourcing firm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We eliminate human resources headaches for businesses with 10 to 1,000 employees by handling their payroll, employee benefits, regulatory compliance and other staffing needs. Contact us to learn how we can streamline your company’s human resources function to save money and reduce risk.

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