The Issue
While meeting during one of our regular, monthly update visits with a large client (roughly 235 employees) two years ago, the head of Human Resources had indicated that they were seeing a rise in the number of employee absences due to work-life stressors, drug issues and personal legal matters. Additionally, even when the impacted employees were in the office they would often spend a good deal of time on telephone calls or writing emails concerning matters relating to the issue or conferring with other office associates, further compounding the loss of productivity.
Our Solution
After doing some work analyzing different approaches to handle this request, we proposed the idea of implementing an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) as a way to further increase the value of the employer sponsored benefit programs and provide long term additional utilization savings to the employer. An EAP program provides assessment and services for addressing a variety of personal concerns that interfere with an employee’s well-being and work performance. And with today’s more stressful home and workplace environments, stress related issues have become both more numerous and more severe. Providing employees with the ability to resolve these issues early before they escalate could yield significant utilization savings and decrease loss of employee productivity.
The Result
After several meetings where we provided study results, analyzed the demographics of their employee population and reviewed all available utilization reports from their medical carrier, we proposed an EAP provider and specifically designed scope of benefits. Due to a concentrated effort on the part of our team and our client’s management team to communicate the benefits of the program to employees, the implemented plan has steadily increased in employee usage and seems well received. The head of HR has reported noticing a decrease in time lost due to personal issues. Although hard to quantify savings in a program like this, most studies show an EAP program returns $2 in savings for every dollar spent. For our client, this amounts to an annual savings of approximately $12,000.