Employee Assistance Programmes - Are They Any Good?

Since they burst on the scene in the 1980s, and 90s, employee assistance programs are often seen as the go to tool for offering counseling and psychological support to employees. Indeed, when most of the clients and the organizations that I speak to proudly state to me that they have an employee's assistance program in place to look after staff. Now, while there are undoubtedly some very good ones about, I think the majority have a lot of questions about them. And so we're going to in this video briefly share three things to look out for with an employee assistance program. Now, the first thing that I would mention to any organization that has one is, who is doing what counseling to your employees. Now, a lot of employee assistance programs work on a model where success is 5% of users actually using them, if not less. So we're working on a model where the idea is, is that you ring up and you get free counseling if you need it. So most employee assistance programs are not like the scale, they don't want all of your employees ringing them up. Secondly, who is doing the counseling? What qualifications do they have? Where are they based? And do they understand your employees needs? In terms of the sort of work that they do? Very often to that the answer is no. These are people that when you ring up the phone line, you get allocated to the nearest counselor.

If you need counseling, often there is very little done in the way of actual triage or diagnosis in the way that there would be if you went to see a nurse or a GP, pretty much in my experience, everyone who rings up for counseling is offered it, whether they are suitable or not, or whether the type of counseling which is predominantly a cognitive behavioral therapy counseling is suitable or not. So we have a situation where little often little triage or diagnosis done, and person is then put in touch with a CBT based counselor, who might just only have geographic location as a link if that. So if you are using an employee assistance program, you know, be really clear what psychological support your employees are getting. from Who What skills do they have? Do they understand the industry you work in and the pressures that your employees might have? Is there a proper triage? Is there a proper diagnosis, what happens to people who aren't eligible because they have more serious conditions, or what happens to people who appear for one session of counseling and then drop off the radar of the other employee of the employee assistance program.

The final things that I wanted to flag is that we're now in a position where a lot of employee assistance programs are being offered for free to organizations as a bolt on to an income protection insurance policy or other health insurance policy type package. It's a way of justifying every increase increasing premiums that we add free things on, which can add an extra complication, in that we have a third party organization. So an organization that we don't even have a relationship with as an employer, offering mental health support to our employees. So all of the things I've just mentioned, apply. But there's the added complication, that the organization doesn't actually have a direct relationship with the organization, providing mental health support to employees, because it's tacked on to an insurance policy. So it's not a direct relationship.

This has potential real problems if we're relying on employee assistance programs to offer mental health support and counseling to our employees. And indeed, it's one of the things most often quoted to me that organizations have, you know, we need to be really clear if we're relying on these companies for mental health support and counseling that we've done our auditing and analysis we know who is doing what mental health support you what are our employees with what diagnosis with what skills and how is there some governance and boundaries around that, which is far more complicated if we don't even have a relationship with the organization doing this?

So I hope this is helpful. I would love your thoughts and comments below. I will caveat again with there are some very good employee assistance programs offering very good support but my concern is that we're not having honest calm sessions about the weaknesses and the problems within employee assistance programs and are relying on them too heavily and in to unquestioned way to deliver mental health support for our employees. I'd love your thoughts and comments on this below. And I look forward to seeing you soon.