Many good
employee assistance programs have closed down, consolidated, or been
turned into 800 hotlines over the past several years.
Will it happen to you?
Many of these solid EAPs lost the battle to stay open even while they
were pointing to lives saved as a result of their services.
Over the years, I have identified a few contributing factors to this
sort of tragedy. The leading factor that stands out is a lack
of difficult employees referred by supervisors as the only way
they could have possibly gotten help--under duress, with the leverage
of job security motivating their choice to use the EAP, and then following through with recommendations given to them.
That's it in a nutshell.
You see, self-referrals are a good thing, but telling top management
that they would never have used an 800# hotline--only your EAP--to get help is not going
to be believed. If you use this line, then I can guarantee that you
will soon be putting your office plants in a cardboard box.
Supervisor referrals of the most at-risk troubled employees, however,
are completely different story.
The most difficult and problematic employees don't use an 800 hotline. Their level of denial and over-adaptive use of defense mechanisms preclude self-motivation and insight.
Instead, these employees reach the EAP because of constructive confrontation by
managers, often where declining the formal supervisor EAP referral means
termination for performance issue. This constructive coercion (which is really what it is) is the dynamic that saves lives. This is leverage.
You can increase the number of these valuable supervisor
referrals, and it may help you not become a statistic. Click here to see two products to grow your EAP utilization with formal supervisor referrals.
