Can someone please explain how an EAP (Employee Assistance Program) works and how it helps?
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The purpose of an EAP is to assist an employee, who is experiencing a life issue that undermines their wellbeing (and by implication, their ability to work, either now or later if it escalates), to access counselling support, paid for by the employer. It does not matter whether the stressor is work related (eg, conflicts with a co-worker) or personal. The idea is that the employee can get early intervention before the issue undermines their work performance, and in so doing, it prevents normally-good workers from becoming bad workers due to life stresses. When successful, it is much cheaper for employers than managing poor performance, eroded relationships, etc because the person has limped along phoning it in or getting into conflicts over a period of time.
The service is typically more responsive than private counselling, in terms of getting an appointment quickly and close to work. It tends to be very outcome focused. If your problem is relatively straightforward, you may get a whole solution. But if you go with a complex relationship problem, the focus will not be on untangling all the history and root causes (as it might be in open-ended private counselling relationships). It will be focused on what can be done in 3-5 sessions to make life noticeably better right now. So that might be identifying the area of conflict causing high stress right now, and what strategies might be used to de-escalate it and restore personal equilibrium. That may also lead to a decision to do longer-term work such as marriage counselling or financial counselling with a private provider, but the EAP is focused on getting you to the point of having a game plan and a sense of taking charge of the problem so that you are controlling it instead of it controlling you. It’s to get you over the hump and able to cope, not to completely solve long-entrenched problems or cure long-standing mental health issues.
I have used EAP for both work-related and personal problems – as well as extensive therapy for more entrenched problems – and I find the approach very refreshing. In basically mentally-well people who have simply encountered a problem or conflict they don’t have the right tools to navigate, or the objectivity to look at with clear eyes, it can be very effective, very quickly. It’s just first aid, not the entire toolkit, but for a lot of things, first aid is good enough.
*Edit:* To give a practical example of the difference…one time, many years ago, I went to discuss a romantic relationship that was troubling me and I wasn’t sure whether to stay. In retrospect, the relationship was a steaming garbage pile, but I was too immersed in it to see it, and I also at that time was much more idealistic about love conquers all, etc. Well, that was all much too much to resolve in the EAP, and I didn’t really expect it to, I just needed to stop being so preoccupied with it. The EAP guy didn’t try to deconstruct all of it. Among other things, he got me to list my characteristics of the right partner, and part of my strategy was to simply watch and wait with that list in mind. That had a *lot* of abstract concepts and skills built in – that I could choose my partner based on their worth, not just because they crossed my path and I felt a connection to him. That I didn’t have to be out of control of the situation even when he was dicking me around, I could be using those moments as data. And so on. I could have spent six months with an ordinary therapist getting to those realisations explicitly, but the EAP gave me strategies with the lessons built in. I think there is a place for both, but I also think the EAP approach has a lot more power than people give it credit for.
It is a program set up through companies to offer free counseling services to their employees. Typically it’s contracted through a specific agency. Associates are generally given a set number of appoints per calendar year. It then is reported back to the company the person works for anonymously. The company should only recieve a total number of associates who have saught help in the past quarter. It allows the associate to have an unbiased opinion and no fear that anything that is said will be said back to the company they work for.
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