Employee Assistance Programmes

Is your company looking to promote health, wellness and vitality? Do you want to offer a confidential facility for employees to explore their personal issues and life development? Do your employees work in dangerous locations? Do your employees spend large amounts of time working unsocial hours or away from home?

As wellness programmes grow in popularity, a structured EAPs (Employee Assistance Programmes) can help you demonstrate positive results in staff retention, cutting health care costs, absenteeism and increasing workers' productivity and motivation.

What is an EAP?

Whilst company leaders may have a very good feel for their business goals and how to accomplish them, they may not always recognise the numerous ways that working environments can contribute to employee distress.

From the obvious sources of distress such as bullying and working anti-social hours, other sources may include working in dangerous locations, being responsible for high-value projects, taking on new responsibilities, personal trauma and many more.

Sometimes employers are completely unaware that an employee maybe silently struggling with a feeling of helplessness, or that work responsibilities have had a major impact at home. They may not be aware what an employee expects of the company or how well they understand their work environment and its associated risks.

Left unresolved, such issues will generally lead an employee to disengage either through loss of focus, absenteeism, reduced productivity and sometimes walking with their feet. The cost to the employer can be enormous.

"Corporate leaders and managers need to give people permission to bring their whole selves to work - their hearts, their minds and their souls. Providing an EAP is a method of doing this." (EAPA Ireland)

Essentially, an EAP provides a confidential 1-1 service through which an employee can access support for the following:

counselling and emotional trauma
lifestyle coaching
health risk assessments
nutrition, fitness and wellbeing
relaxation therapies eg reflexology, massage

Organised group wellbeing initiatives such as yoga and meditation, stop-smoking support groups may also be organised.

"Simply asking people to self-monitor their own conditions in not a sufficient safeguard to prevent stress from becoming an accident risk" (EAPA Ireland).

A member of EAPA Ireland, Xenergie offers a comprehensive service to employers in designing and implementing EAP schemes.