Checklist: Is your EAP Provider meeting your needs?

Employee assistance programs have been around for many years and have offered useful support in a range of workplace critical incident responding. However, more recent developments in technology have allowed EAP to be more proactive in its support of employees.

Surprisingly, despite these developments, EAP services have remained largely the same in focusing in reactive and face-to-face support for employees in crisis. Uprise Health Employee Assistance Program is the first EAP to focus on being proactive with HR to prevent the development or worsening of psychosocial injury.

Being proactive is defined as serving to prepare for, intervene in, or control an expected occurrence or situation, especially a negative or difficult one. Someone who is proactive aims to control a negative situation by making things happen, rather than waiting for it to get worse.

“If HR managers are able to foster the capability to be proactive through designing good HR systems and practices, they have greater potential to make a difference to the bottom line of an organization. And that includes how HR people look at how they themselves can be more effectively proactive,” says Professor Sharon Parker, director of Curtin University’s Centre for Transformative Work Design.

Out of any service for the workplace, an Employee Assistance Program should be the most proactive as it deals with the cumulative risk of worsening mental health.

How does your EAP measure up compared to the capabilities of more modern EAP providers?

Does your EAP reach out to more than the 1 in 5 employees who are experiencing a mental health issue?

Reactive EAP has an average 4% uptake, ignoring the additional 16% of employees who may be in crisis but don’t seek traditional support due to fear, confidentiality or stigma.

Does your EAP predict stress, mental health risk or turnover risk?

Uprise measures these risk levels by reaching out to and assessing on average 24% and up to 80% of your employees via digital channels.

Does your EAP manage stress before it worsens to clinical levels?

Uprise is centered around training employees while they are well to improve their resilience in times of stress. Reactive counselling of severe stress and mental health conditions should not be the norm of mental health support at work.

Does your EAP recommend ways to prevent stressors re-occurring in the future?

Uprise measures causes of stress and reports on them quarterly to provide HR with actionable insights on how to improve the employee experience.

Some other questions you may want to use to assess your EAP include does your EAP:

• Maximize employee happiness for optimal productivity?
• Normalize mental health? Or mental ill health?
• Provide timely regional worker support?
• Provide effective online and phone services?
• Recognize the early indicators of post traumatic stress disorder?
• Know the pressures of frontline workers in the health, justice and emergency services fields?
• Work from a sound theoretical evidence base that empowers individuals to take control of their own health and wellbeing?

If the answer to any or most of these is no, then you may be using an outdated form of EAP that fails to account for the growing number of employees struggling with mental health concerns. Contact Uprise Health to learn more about proactive, science based and early intervention options that are easy to set-up and test.

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