Keep up your efforts to promote your employee assistance program.

Too often, employees remain reluctant to seek help – and their employers often pay the price.

A recent Harvard University study found poor EAP use costs American employers heavily in four different ways. The top three: presenteeism, absenteeism and medical claims for treatments that don’t work. The total employer cost per year is $50 billion.

The fourth way is through increased legal risk. In each of the last two years, companies have paid $4 million in damages to depressed workers who sued their employers under the ADA.

Meanwhile, a Mid America Coalition on Health Care study found:

• just 50% of 6,400 workers surveyed said they’d feel comfortable using a work-sponsored EAP if they felt overwhelmed by personal issues, and
• one-third said they didn’t even know how to access its resources.

On the flip side, the more actively a company promotes the availability and complete confidentiality of its EAP, the more comfortable most employees are in using it if they need help.