HR leaders and talent managers don’t usually think much about this, but your EAP — your Employee Assistance Program — can give you great insight into the issues and concerns troubling your employees.
Here’s a case in point: A number of years ago, I was executive editor of a newspaper in Hawaii. A new editor was brought in over me, and this guy’s bullying style did not mesh well with Hawaiian culture, or the people working for him in the newsroom.
About four months after this new editor started, someone from the local hospital that administered our EAP called the newspaper’s HR director and asked, “What’s going on in your newsroom? Something must be happening, because the number of people we’re seeing for stress-related issues has jumped 800 percent!”
Yes, the data from that EAP program in Hawaii gave us some pretty sobering insights into the impact of the new editor’s ham-fisted management style. It didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, but it gave a lot of people throughout the organization some insight into just how bad the problem was — and the impact this one manager was having on his entire workforce.
This came to mind because a new survey from Workplace Options (they describe themselves as “the world’s leading provider of integrated employee well-being services”) came out this week, and it’s about global EAP data that gives some pretty interesting insight into things that are bothering workers today.
Workplace Options examined data encompassing from “a relatively stable population of more than 100,000 employees across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and South America,” and used that data to evaluate “global trends in the use of its Employee Assistance Programs. The data represented all EAP inquiries made by this group from 2012-2014.”
Here’s what they found:
“Serious mental health issues can have a devastating effect on organizations around the world,” said Dean Debnam, CEO of Workplace Options, in a press release about the survey. “What this analysis means for businesses around the world is that if your employees’ emotional well-being wasn’t already on the top of your list of priorities, it needs to be.”
What does this mean? It’s hard to know exactly, and the Workplace Options data doesn’t get very specific, but really, any good manager can probably tell you what they’re seeing.
You know what I mean — it’s about the stressful, changing nature of today’s workforce in the post-recession economy, with more and more people working less than they want to, with little or nothing in the way of raises or increased compensation, in a system that says it wants experience and skills but then seems to not want to pay for it.
My recommendation for any talent manager is that you should use your EAP data as an early warning system that you can use to get a fix on what is bothering your workforce before it reaches a critical level. It’s an underutilized resource that most managers (even those in HR) don’t give a lot of thought about, but it has really useful information that you should be paying attention to.
You owe it to yourself, and your workforce, to do this. Consider this advice a early Christmas present from me to you.
Of course, there’s more than troubling EAP data in the news this week. Here are some HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly wrap-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.