EAPs essential to support UK workforce during lockdown

EAPs essential to support UK workforce during lockdown

EAPs and wellbeing services have become essential planks of support for the UK workforce during lockdown, according to the insurance industry.

A senior roundtable event this month, capturing the experiences of heads of group risk, confirmed that added-value services like EAPs will be a central feature of their business offerings for many months to come.

EAP providers have coped well with the sudden spike in demand from employees, they agreed. Aviva, for example, has reported a tenfold increase in the volume of calls made to helplines part of its EAP offerings (delivered by EAPA member Care First). “Service standards remain at the level we expect,” said Aviva’s head of group protection Jason Ellis. “Suppliers have been able to maintain levels of business continuity.”

Roundtable members pointed to the likely trend for more smaller businesses without specialist HR functions to be looking for EAP, as well as other mental health and wellbeing services, to help staff deal with the longer-term implications of the pandemic. 

“The EAP has sometimes been treated as a service that stays in the background, a fall back for dealing with an occasional crisis. But now the EAP is coming into its own, demonstrating its essential worth and capability,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell.

“EAP professionals of all kinds have stepped up, alongside other frontline key workers in the UK, to deal with the surge in demand, and all the complexities and tragedies that calls to helplines inevitably bring.

“Employers have become increasingly conscious in recent years of the VUCA environment (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) affecting every kind of private or public operation: the potential for radical disruption, the need for resilience and adaptability. Covid-19, though, has brought the theory into focus in ways and at a level that no-one would have predicted.

“Whatever changes the pandemic brings about in terms of increased levels of remote working, more autonomous systems and use of Artificial Intelligence – work will remain all about people and the ability of people to give the best of themselves through times of challenge and complexity. 

“Employers and line managers can’t be expert advisors and counsellors. EAPs can.”