First, some definitions in this ”mental wellbeing service jungle”:

EAP: employee assistance program is an employee benefit program that assists employees with personal challenges/limitations and/or work-related challenges that may impact their job performance, health, mental and emotional well-being. Employer pays for this service.

Workplace counseling: is a reciprocal service offered to employees of a company, often through an employee assistance program, that provides employees with a safe place to discuss any issues that they have challenges with.

Coaching: is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance.

And some comparison to psychotherapy: workplace counseling has very different approach/angle than psychotherapy although fundamentals are similar: when psychotherapist usually works with diagnosed individuals outside workplace, a workplace counselor works with ”non diagnosed” individuals to develop one’s self aweareness, emotional intelligence, compassionate communication and self esteem & confidence among others; so workplace counseling focuses more on developing one’s skills to cope better with future challenges rather than ”healing sick person”. Psychotherapy is also typically longer than worplace counseling: worplace counseling usually lasts 3-12 months whereas psychotherapy can last several years.

At MindFaculty we aim to combine best pieces from counseling and coaching and always keeping the counseled person in focus – so we aim to taylor made the approach each time according to individual human being. Sometimes the process looks more like coaching whereas sometimes it looks more like counseling. So we always want to treat each case unique.

Then, I wrapped up some quick facts regarding EAP and workplace counseling:

• It has been studied that workplace counseling has decreased as much as 60% sick leave costs.
• EAP has been studied to increase productivity as much as 25% (defined as ”presenteeism”).
• Amazing ROI: it has been studied that in EAP the return on investment (based on reduced absences, shortened disability, lower health care costs, and reduced work impairment) is between $3 and $10 per $1 invested in EAP services.

Sometimes EAP/workplace counseling/coaching are set to fail despite all the good evidence from the academic world. Typically these services (*) are likely to fail:

• When leaders and/or staff is not motivated/willing to try out – and there are plenty of ”sub reasons” for this – to name a few:
  • People might consider that they already know all so thus no need for external assistance
  • People are ”sceptic by heart” and have hard time to believe all the positive results academic world has produced over 2 decades regarding EAP/workplace counseling/coaching
  • People have fear of unknown: when not knowing about the process, it could be easier to never start the process at all
  • People might still have ”stigma thinking” (this applies more to older than millenial generations): people might view this more as ”therapy for sick people and this doesn’t apply for me”. As described earlier this is a false interpretation as workplace counseling focuses more on developing people.
• Trust issue: this is absolute crucial. There needs to be trust in order for this to work. Without mutual trust none of these services will succeed (*). And trust issue is also multidimensional. One who buys the service, needs to trust the one providing the service – especially the competence. There needs to be a trust between executive level and employees: is external provider independent and fair to ”both sides”. Can the external provider be trusted that information doesn’t leak: one cant do counseling work if there isn’t 100% confidentiality and secrecy principles. And so on and so on.

If none of the above mentioned ”fail reasons” exist, then there should be no reason, why EAP/workplace counseling wouldn’t have a major success in your organization – just as it has had world wide in several dfifferent organizations. If you are interested to hear more and ask our free opinion how to design EAP in your organization, please contact us via LinkedIn or email: info@mindfaculty.fi   / Br, Aku