Introduction to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs)
In this week’s article, we’ll look at a growing employee benefit: Employee Assistance Programs, namely:
1) What are they?
2) What benefits are included for your employees
3) How you benefit as a company for having an EAP
4) Key Features
5) How they can be implemented in your organization
What are EAPs?
Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) are workplace initiatives that help employees address personal and professional issues that might affect their job performance, health, and well-being. These programs typically offer services such as digital counseling, mental health support, financial advice, and legal assistance.
For example, if you know the company Better Help, it’s similar to that but your company provides it for your employees. In other words, it provides employees with external support while being employer-sponsored.
What Benefits are Included
Broadly speaking, EAP services consits of two categories:
1) Preventative Services
- professional stress
- work stress
- counselling & coaching services
- work-life balance support
2) Crisis Management
- confidential counselling for any crisis going on in your employees lives
- death of a family member
- substance abuse issues
- marital problems
How you benefit as a company for having an EAP
Implementing an EAP comes with numerous advantages. Mental wellbeing is key to a happy, healthy & productive workforce. By offering this benefit, your company can experience a range of positive outcomes:
- Support Employees– Resolve issues which negatively impact their health, performance and well-being
- Mental Wellness – Increased mental wellness
- Higher Productivity – EAPs have a proven postive impact on companies who take them
- Healthy Workspace – Create a healthy, postive & collaborative work environment
- Stand out – Create a diversified employee benefits program using it to recruit & retain staff
Key Features of EAPs
With an EAP, you get seamless end-to-end mental well-being programs that serve employees across APAC and include support in over 22 different languages spoken by mental health professionals.
Additionally, your company can track utilization rates through an integrated insights dashboard. To ensure success, your HR team should conduct an initial onboarding seminar so employees take full advantage of their EAP.
How an EAP can be Implemented
EAPs can either be:
1) Part of your Group Health Insurance
In some cases, private health insurers incorporate EAP programs into their group health insurance benefits. This trend will only continue to rise. However, in our experience, the utilization rates are quite low as the focus is usually on medical insurance benefits.
2) Standalone Program
Employee Benefits Asia has partned with leading EAP service providers in Asia Pacific who offer both standardized or tailor-made plans to companies of all sizes.
If you don’t have an EAP program as part of your group health insurance, then consider speaking with us about starting an EAP program.
