UK Employee Assistance Professionals Association

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Thursday 31^st March 2022 at 5.00 pm

Webinar Online

The 23rd Annual General Meeting of UK Employee Assistance Professionals Association will be held on Thursday 31^st March 2022 at 5.00 pm 

Order of business

1.       Open the meeting

2.       Apologies

3.       Approve minutes of the last AGM held on 24th March 2021

4.       Chairman’s address

5.       Treasurers report

6.        Election of Officers and Board members

7.       Awards presentation

8.       AOB

9.      Close the meeting

Following the formal part of the meeting, we shall have a discussion on the evolving market for EAP and broadening expectations.

EAP usage and ROI: the pandemic effect in 2021

The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 put huge pressures onto employers, their people — and also EAPs. Data from the EAPA UK ROI calculator on EAP usage, impact and financial returns in the UK, representing anonymised information from seven million employees, has suggested that 347,000 more employees turned to support from an EAP between October 2020 and October 2021 compared with previous years.

More people used the full range of EAP services – but in particular there was more complexity of cases, meaning more employees withy multiple issues who needed to access ongoing support and counselling.

Rising ROI

A headline from the latest 2020/21 data, based on information from more than 1,000 EAP usage calculations, is the increase in ROI reported: £8.00 per £1.00 invested, compared with £7.27 in the previous year.

Large employers in particular have seen huge increases in their EAP ROI. Up to 50% in some cases (for those with 5,000 or more staff, up on average from £8.43 to £12.75; and from £8.47 to £12.48 for the 1,000-5,000 employee group).

Get more

“EAPs have done a remarkable job in responding to the spikes in demand,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell. “The industry knows that levels of usage are going to stay high for the foreseeable future as people deal with the ongoing fall-out from Covid-19 and the different impacts on finances, relationships and wellbeing in general.

“For HR it’s a critical time for demonstrating that wellbeing programmes and support is having an impact and that increased spending is worthwhile. Using the EAPA ROI calculator is one way of doing that – as well as making sure attention is being given to the EAP in how its used, its promotion, management and benchmarking.”

EAP usage and ROI: the pandemic effect in 2021 – EAPA UK

A third of employers are still not talking about mental health

In the second year of the global pandemic — when more employees were struggling with the fall-out from all the initial threats and disruption, the disconnection from routines and colleagues, and no end to problems in sight — all employers would have been expected to step up their attention to people’s wellbeing.

Through a YouGov poll, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) asked employers whether they had talked in person to staff about mental wellbeing in the past year. 

Making contact

The survey findings, gathered in time for February’s ‘Time to Talk Day’, showed that more than a third, 35% had not brought the subject up with people (3% didn’t know or couldn’t remember, and another 3% preferred not to say).

In response, Acas has called for employers to make sure they are “approachable, available and encourage team members to talk”, as well as keeping in regular contact with remote and hybrid workers. It has also highlighted the importance of meeting individual needs for different methods of talking — via phone, email or video call.

Value of being pro-active

“The past two years have seen a real focus from HR teams on wellbeing as a whole — but that doesn’t mean the box has been ticked on mental health,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell. “Occasional awareness campaigns aren’t enough.”

“Steep rises in the use of EAP services in 2021 have been one signal of how employees have needed professional support and people to talk with confidentially. Our latest research at EAPA also shows how the more pro-active employers are in promoting their EAP the bigger the ROI, £8.00 for every £1.00 spent on average, but up to more than £15.00 for some of the most engaged EAP-users.”

A third of employers are still not talking about mental health – EAPA UK

EAPA Virtual Conference

Conference Date: March 24, 2022

Time: 9:00am Eastern Time U.S. – 4:15pm Eastern Time U.S.

Cost: Register Early and Take Advantage of Early Bird Rates! 

• Early Bird, EAPA Member rate – $300 (through March 1, 2022)
• Early Bird, Non-member rate – $400 (through March 1, 2022)
• Regular Registration, EAPA Member rate – $350 (March 2 – March 21)
• Regular Registration, Non-member rate – $450 (March 2 – March 21)

PDH Credits available: Approved by the EACC for 5 PDHs

Schedule of Events:

• 9:00am – 9:15am – General Opening
• 9:15am – 10:15am – Session 1 (3 sessions to choose from)
• 10:30am – 11:30am – Session 2 (3 sessions to choose from)
• 11:30am – 12:30pm – Lunch Break
• 12:30pm – 1:30pm – Keynote – Integrative Care in Behavioral Health and Addiction Treatment, Dr. Philip Hemphill
• 1:45pm – 2:45pm – Session 3 (3 sessions to choose from)
• 3:00pm – 4:00pm – Session 4 (3 sessions to choose from)
• 4:00pm – 4:15pm – Concluding thoughts

Join Us!

Please join us for the first ever EAPA Virtual Conference! The event will take place on Thursday, March 24, 2022. This event will offer you the opportunity to earn PDH/CEU hours, while participating in interesting sessions, networking with new and old friends, and getting back to the business of being together and learning.

We will kick off the day with opening remarks from EAPA President Kristin Rantala and EAPA CEO Julie Fabsik-Swarts. Following the opening remarks, we will have 2 morning breakout sessions, each separated by a 15-minute break, and then we will break for lunch. During lunch, you can use tools provided by the platform to connect with other attendees. You will have the ability to send messages to people through the platform, and you can also do things like make calls through the platform. Use that hour to meet new people or catch up with folks that you haven’t seen in a while! At 12:30pm, we will reconvene for our keynote speaker Philip Hemphill, PhD, presenting Integrative Care in Behavioral Health and Addiction Treatment. When we finish with the keynote, we will go back into two afternoon breakout sessions, each separated by a 15-minute break. At 4pm, we will all re-convene as a group to hear some concluding thoughts, from Kristin Rantala and Julie Fabsik-Swarts. We will conclude for the day by 4:15pm ET.

Find out more about the EAPA Virtual Conference HERE

Why UK employers lead the world on wellbeing practice

Based on data on people practices and policies from across 1,800 organisations certified by Top Employers Institute, the UK is doing substantially more around health and wellbeing.

Almost all UK Top Employers offer an EAP (98% of the 84 that have been certified). That compares with 71% internationally. Meanwhile 80% in the UK have their own wellbeing champion to drive initiatives versus 59% elsewhere. There’s also more breadth of offering: 76% have religious or spiritual facilities (compared with 26%); 89% provide financial education (60%). Activity has stepped in the past year. 96% now promote physical activity, up from 79% in the 2020/21 data.

On/off

Importantly, there’s also evidence that UK businesses are trying to address the fall-out from ‘always on’ working. 58% now guarantee time to “unplug” or take stress-relief breaks (up from 44% in last year’s data); 65% now actively discourage use of email outside normal working hours (up from 48%); 48% offer programmes for coping with information overload (38%). 63% now also offer burnout recovery support (compared with 49%).

Other data provides more context for why UK employers are putting more into employee wellbeing. In terms of business priorities for HR, supporting organisational and cultural change remains top; the need to drive growth has jumped into second place. Health and safety of employees has stayed third.

Necessary action

“The top priorities for HR highlighted by the data are all linked,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell.

“The need for change and growth in the post-pandemic period, to re-build and re-assert market presence, is clear. But all of that is founded on the effort and commitment of people still dealing with the after-effects of the Covid-19 crisis and all it’s meant for their lives and routines. That’s why new and expanded health and wellbeing practices have become so important, not just as a token principe, but for helping build the resilience of people resources.”

Eugene Farrell on UK wellbeing practice.

Why a four-day week won’t transform workplace wellbeing

A group of around 30 companies across the UK are taking part in a new trial of a four-day working week.

The pilot is being carried out by the 4 Day Week Global partnership made up of the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, the Autonomy think tank and Boston College. Under the six month scheme, employees will be given the same pay but will also be expected to deliver the same degree of productivity.

The UK project follows in the footsteps of Iceland where working hours were cut to 35-36 each week for 2,500 workers. An analysis of the outcomes showed how there had been rises in both productivity and wellbeing. Scotland announced plans for its own trial in 2021.

Output focus

The pilot is seen as having the potential to being about a step-change in the nature of work. According to the 4 Day Week website: “The UK works longer hours than most of Europe. It is not making us more productive. It is making us stressed, over-worked and burnt out.

“The four-day week challenges the current model of work and helps companies move away from simply measuring how long people are ‘at work’, to a sharper focus on the output being produced. 2022 will be the year that heralds in this bold new future of work.”

Research backs up the value of shorter working hours to UK staff. A survey by Censuswide for ClickUp found that almost a third were “actively looking for a four-day week” or have already agreed one with their employer.

No silver bullet

“Presenteeism isn’t healthy for anyone, so a more flexible attitude to working hours, with more focus on getting work done rather than time spent at a desk has to be a step forward,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell.

“At the same time it’s important that HR and employers are clear about what offering shorter hours actually means in practice. Encouraging good mental health isn’t so simple as a four day week, as we’ve seen from more people working from home.

“On the surface WFH means flexibility, more time for family and friends. But it also means no divide between home and work. Sometimes a greater sense of pressure. Isolation. More people working longer without noticing. And what about when extra time at home only exacerbates worries and concerns around relationships or finances?

“Four day weeks may well be a significant part of the future of work for many, but in terms of wellbeing it’ll just be one factor in a complicated picture where listening and understanding individual situations will continue to be critical.”

Huge rises in EAP use during 2021 means higher ROI

347,000 more employees turned to support from an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) between October 2020 and October 2021 compared with previous years.

As a consequence of higher usage, employers are seeing a higher Return on Investment from their EAP. For every £1.00 spent on an EAP in the UK, employers have seen an average return on investment (ROI) of £8.00. This compares with a previous average of £7.27. 

The new data is based on evidence from information provided by 3,200 HR professionals using the EAPA UK ROI calculator : the biggest data set on EAP usage, impact and financial returns in the UK, representing anonymised information from seven million employees. More than 1,000 calculations were made in the 2021 period.

Paul Roberts, EAPA UK board member and research project lead, said: “Figures like these on usage and ROI don’t convey the full picture of what’s been happening among employees. Behind the numbers are human stories. We know from all of our conversations with EAP providers that the average call now involves more complexity, more employees with multiple issues to deal with, meaning more stretch and strain for operations.

“EAPs have stood up to the test – dealing with the additional volume of calls and contact, more need for ongoing counselling – and continue to do so despite shortages of counselling staff.”

EAPA UK Chair, Eugene Farrell said: “Higher EAP usage is here to stay, for the foreseeable future. We’re seeing the gradual fall-out from disrupted and changing lives, from more uncertainty. During these times HR need to be demonstrating the specific value of their focus on wellbeing and the ROI data can be part of this: for benchmarking, illustrating the value of active communications and engagement, and for looking at the potential impact of trying different models of services and changing the level of investment.”

According to the new data, large employers in particular have seen huge increases in their EAP ROI. Up to 50% in some cases (for those with 5,000 or more staff, up on average from £8.43 to £12.75; and from £8.47 to £12.48 for the 1,000-5,000 employee group). This appears to be the result of higher levels of engagement with the EAP: following the best practice advice on how to get the best from an EAP.

The calculator was developed for EAPA by the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) as an open source tool for benchmarking.

Why the overworking ‘cult’ lives on

“We dehumanised the workplace a long time ago,” says Anat Lechner, New York University’s clinical associate professor of management.

“For many companies, it’s still: ‘If you don’t work, then someone else will come along and do it. And if that’s not gonna help, we’ll allocate it to the AI. And if the AI takes over, we’ll put together a gig workforce.’

Academics are pointing to this year as a critical crossroads for society as a whole. Is wellbeing really a priority, or as we learn to live with Covid-19, do we re-focus on work and careers and what will impress bosses? Management experts argue that we’re not entering a new period where health at work comes first at all: the cult of overworking is too strong, and nothing has really changed.

Since the start of the pandemic, figures suggest working weeks have only got longer for many workers.

“It’s not necessarily a message people like to hear,” Lechner points out. “They think they enter a relationship with an employer where the relationship says, ‘I work hard, you take care of me’. Again, this is a 20th Century mindset.”

Why we overwork

Historically, there are a range of reasons why overworking has gained in status and acceptance. Most recently, since the 1980s, there has been a romanticisation of work — especially among middle class knowledge workers — in films, TV and media generally. Overworking has been seen as being part of a successful life; the busier people are, the less they sleep even, the more glamorous their life.

“Workplaces can be very unhealthy environments – if there was any time to change the way we work, now is the time to do it,” according to Christina Maslach, professor emerita of psychology at the University of California. “If you take a plant and put it in a pot and don’t water it and give it lousy soil and not enough sun, I don’t care how gorgeous the plant was to begin with – it isn’t going to thrive.”

Practical wellbeing

“Nothing good will come from pretending that the new rafts of wellbeing programmes being introduced by employers are an answer in themselves,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell.

“And hybrid working hasn’t necessarily meant less stress. In many ways the UK workforce is just feeling more pressures generally: the pressure to renew their levels of performance post-crisis, as well as pressure to take care of their wellbeing.

“For wellbeing to truly be a priority there has to be a level of trade-off in terms of working hours and performance targets, the expectations of management, so that for the longer-term our relationship with work becomes healthier. No more boom and bust.”

Will workplace friendships survive in the remote and virtual worlds?

Asked what has most affected their mental health, 41% of WFH staff in a Gazprom survey said it was not being able to socialise with their colleagues.

Shasta Nelson is author of The Business of Friendship: Making the Most of Our Relationships Where We Spend Most of Our Time. “Work is the number one place where people make friends,” she says. “Loneliness has been proven not only to contribute to health issues and unhappiness, but also to impact workplace productivity, employee retention, innovation, and the company’s profitability. Research has shown that loneliness in the workplace can lead to an increase of absenteeism by nearly 37%, and a 16% decrease in profitability with a 65% decrease in share price over time.

“We’re more likely to be lonely at work if we’re a new hire, senior leader, male, Hispanic or African American, in poor or fair physical or mental health, Generation Z or Millennial, or working remote.”

Arranging friends

Employers have been finding new ways to encourage socialising, even if it means sticking to Zoom or Teams.

Trayport, an energy trading software firm, won the 2021 Employee Benefits award for supporting employees during the pandemic. The response of HR included a ‘working from home doesn’t mean working alone’ wellbeing campaign. Trayport arranged new online activities linked to a wellbeing theme each week, as well as quizzes and other entertainments like a magician. The wellbeing offering was expanded to include virtual classes in yoga, mindfulness and fitness.

Other employers have set up virtual happy hours for after work catch-ups, team games and encouraged the use of chat forums for casual chit-chat.

Who’s listening now?

“Organised events for socialising are one thing — but the reason why so many friendships are made at work, and why those relationships are so valued, is that they weren’t the result of formal, organised activity,” comments EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell.

“The moments over cups of coffee and meeting on the stairs were where people were just being themselves. Sometimes it was just the chance to let off steam about demands from the boss, to step outside work roles and identities, that kept people feeling human.

“The concern must be that if people aren’t able to make or keep up face-to-face friendships then they don’t have those colleagues who they can take into their confidence. There’s even fewer people they can share their worries with, about work or home life.

“In this context, the EAP is an even more important listening service, making sure everyone has an outlet for talking openly and in confidence with a friendly, well-informed supporter.”

Will workplace friendships survive in the remote and virtual worlds? EAPA UK

Corporate Wellbeing Expo, 9-10 March, Excel London

EAPA is delighted to be a supporting partner of the Corporate Wellbeing Expo on 9-10 March, taking place at Excel London. In this post-pandemic world, employers are increasingly aware that a positive workplace culture and support for employee wellbeing is fundamental to future success and to creating a happy, engaged and productive workforce. The Corporate Wellbeing Expo is an opportunity to hear and learn about what’s new and coming up in employee wellbeing.

For EAPA members interested in exhibiting at the Expo, contact Jon Hopwood on 02045 178 888 or at jon@inspiredmotive.co.uk

Register today for your free ticket – https://business-revival-series-2022.reg.buzz/the-eapa-banners