3 Ways that EAP Should Support Young Workers

A recent study by the Myers Briggs Company found that the wellbeing of employees improves with age. In an international study, they surveyed over 10,000 people from 131 countries. They found that those in the age group 18-24 years reported the lowest levels of wellbeing and those in the age group 65+ years reported the highest.

The report suggested that this difference was due to older employees having developed ways to support their wellbeing over the years. As a result, they suggested widespread mentoring would allow for younger employees to learn techniques to manage wellbeing and build better workplace relationships.

Employee Assistance Programs can simultaneously offer effective ways to better target and support younger employees who may be entering a role for the first time. The most effective and modern employee assistance programs should offer these specialised aspects of service.

Uprise Health is proud to report that 50% of users on our platform are under the age of 35. They are able to gain access to key resilience and stress management skills at the start of their career to improve their ability to cope and likelihood to stay at a workplace.

ONLINE ACCESS TO SUPPORT

Young people have grown up alongside technology. They use and expect a certain level of technological advancement within the processes of their workplace. When it comes to accessing mental health support or resources, younger employees feel more comfortable seeking support, information and advice online.

Employee Assistance Programs like Uprise Health offer an online booking system and multi-channel access to support including chat, email, phone, video or face-to-face. This flexibility makes it significantly easier for younger employees to ask for help compared to traditional face-to-face counselling.

EARLY INTERVENTION

A common technique of Employee Assistance Programs is to wait for an employee to reach out, often after they have experienced a significant amount of stress. This is risky and damaging to young employees who may be in their first graduate employment and lack the skills to cope. Plus, there may be further anxiety or fear that they will lose employment or make a bad impression in a new job by asking for support early on.

Early intervention Employee Assistance Programs like Uprise Health reach out to all employees when they first start at the company. This is often done using a wellbeing check where young employees can check their wellbeing score by doing a quick online assessment. They receive a score out of 100 that reflects their wellbeing relative to the population and offers wellbeing training recommendations.

Uprise Health trains employees using Upskill, an online resilience building toolkit that allows employees to proactively take steps to improve their wellbeing. This is essential for younger employees who would benefit significantly from learning these techniques early on in their career, that they can draw upon in years to come.

“Six months after the course I still draw on the online tools, my experience and the changes I have been able to incorporate into my life.” – Melanie, Uprise user at Medibank

Try a demo of the program today to see how you can start supporting your employees proactively.

MANAGER TRAINING

As suggested in the report, manager training and mentoring is integral to creating an open conversation within your organization. By sharing experiences, older employees can offer really useful and actionable advice to younger employees both work and non-work related.

There are many ways that an Employee Assistance Program should be supporting this kind of open and de-stigmatized culture. This includes:

• Manager training on how to identify and support an employee who is struggling
• Conversation tips for different kinds of employees
• Changing the language to resilience, mental fitness and coaching for life stress
• Comms about common wellbeing issues and tips to managing them
• Comms from leadership about the importance of wellbeing