Content area
Full text
An employee assistance programme (EAP) is one human resource strategy which may help to combat the now well recognized human and organizational costs of workplace stress, and with the growing acceptability and use of counselling in UK organizations, there is an increasing demand for information on the effectiveness of EAPs. The potential benefits of counselling for the individual in distress include improved mental wellbeing, better functioning at work, and enhanced job and life satisfaction, and for the organization they potentially include a reduction in sickness absence and unwanted turnover and accident rates, and improvements in internal communication, health and safety, and external PR (being perceived as "caring employers").
In the US, the financial and other benefits of stress care are widely recognized and most of the Fortune 500 companies have employee counselling services in place. UK companies are also now recognizing that by helping employees cope with stress they may be able to reduce absenteeism, improve morale and ultimately boost profitability. Most larger companies in the UK are therefore beginning to see EAPs not as an additional cost, but as a wise investment. This is almost certainly true in the medium to long term, although convincing measures of the benefit are not yet available in the UK. Because no conclusive evaluations have yet been done in this country, some UK employers are sceptical about the benefits, particularly financial, of stress counselling schemes.
In the UK, evaluations tend to be almost exclusively qualitative in nature, other than basic statistical reports on usage rates and the like. However, in the US there has been a move away from such anecdotal evidence of EAP effectiveness towards insisting on hard data (i.e. cost-benefit ratios). "Almost every company with an EAP in the US is subjecting it to close scrutiny in terms of cost-benefit, utilization and success rates. All sorts of bottom line questions are being asked"[1]. In the future, this type of hard data is likely to be demanded by UK companies as well.
Since most EAPs were created in an era of increased accountability and because of their relationship to cost-conscious for profit organizations, one would expect EAPs to generate many evaluation studies. In fact, researchers[2] in this field seem to be still searching for identity, direction, methodologies...