Why EAPs are essential to a proactive approach to sickness absence

Why EAPs are essential to a proactive approach to sickness absence

Research by the CIPD and Simplyhealth [[https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/2023-pdfs/8436-health-and-wellbeing-employee-views-2023.pdf ]] has suggested UK employees took an average of 7.8 days of sick leave in the last year — an increase of two whole days over pre-pandemic levels, and the highest number of 10 years. The data comes from 6.5 million employees in 918 UK organisations.

Stress was picked out as a key reason for the increases, with 76% of employees seeing it as the main factor: stress caused primarily by ‘heavy workloads’ and ‘management style’. The most common reasons for long-term absence were given as mental ill health (63%), acute medical conditions such as stroke or cancer (51%) and musculoskeletal injuries (51%). 

Whose responsibility?

The report found most organisations were addressing health and wellbeing issues through occupational sick pay leave schemes (69%) and access to an EAP (82 per cent). At the same time, only 53% have a standalone wellbeing strategy looking at how to best integrate and drive activities.

It goes on to suggest there needs to be a shift in responsibility for employee wellbeing towards a shared role via preventative health and wellbeing strategies in order to deliver better results and reverse the sickness absence trend.

The proactive EAP

EAPA UK Chair, Karl Bennett said: “EAPs aren’t — or shouldn’t be — just a reactive offering. Any preventative health programme needs to start with raising awareness of the range of EAP provision, and its value in helping to address root issues early, the kinds of issues that snowball from feelings of stress and loss of control into both physical and mental health problems.

“EAPs have always been seen as an employee benefit — but I believe we are now much more than that, supporting millions of people each year with counselling, professional assessments and psychological therapies, we have become the ‘go-to’ for mental health support for businesses. 

“As a sector we need to be encouraging a focus on the preventative elements of our services, adding more non-clinical services like Mental Health Coaching.”