Training and Reaching Supervisors with EAP Essentials

How do you reach supervisors who are unable to attend supervisor training and other related educational programs offered by the EAP?

Unless your supervisors are communicating regularly with the EAP, they will slowly come to misunderstand it, not trust it, or simply forget to use it as tool to manage difficult behavior and performance problems. The risk to the organization is troubled employees being referred too late or not at all. If one of these employees has serious emotional issues, especially the potential for violence, the organization obviously is at increased risk from an inadequate relationship with the EAP and supervisors. (This is on of the strongest argument for avoiding an EAP "product" wrapped in an insurance plan, largely only a 800# call-in service, that omits an aggressive interface with supervisors.)

So what's the solution for increasing communication and training of supervisors when EAPs can't get "face time" with them? Supervisor training sessions are “iffy” things for companies. Some department managers will work against you, believing they can’t spare the time or give up their supervisors. Frequently, troubled supervisors skip out of training if it is not mandatory. Experienced employee assistance professionals have observed that supervisors with alcohol problems may shy away supervisor training sessions.

Without training in EAP essentials, these managers will remain ignorant about how to use the EAP as a management tool to refer troubled employees. To accomplish this goal, you should subscribe to The FrontLine Supervisor EAP newsletter. The FrontLine Supervisor is the only education tool in the EAP field to educate supervisors continuously about EAP process and supervision skills, while it increases supervisor referrals. A subscription to it increases the rate of supervisor referrals, and the publisher guarantees this outcome.

Supervisors must have ongoing education. One training session won’t cut it. Some HR departments or EAPs may publish their own supervisor education newsletter. Great! It should be distributed on time and it should appear monthly. Quarterly newsletters and the like are simply too infrequent to make an programmatic impact. By default, they tend to be four pages, and therefore too much to read before they are discarded. The FrontLine Supervisor’s question and answer format has proven success rate after 16 years of being irresistible to busy supervisors.

Misuse and Abuse of Drugs Defined

You can be an expert on a subject and stumble over your tongue trying to explain some simple concept if you are under pressure or caught off guard. It happens to all of us. For example, can you explain in seconds the difference between misuse and abuse of drugs? I am sure you know the difference, but unless you have a rehearsed and prepared script in mind, you may back up a few times as you try to clarify the difference. It's at these special times that a handout comes in handy.

I found a great handout that discusses the difference between misuse and abuse of drugs. It was emailed to me by one of my article sources at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. There's no copyright, so you print and copy this handout and use it in trainings. It would be a good for supervisor training in workplace substance abuse or employee drug and alcohol awareness, for that matter.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/UCM220434.pdf

Have you previewed for free the two hour DOT alcohol and drug training web course available from WorkExcel.com? Email me here and I will send you the temporary link that launches the course. This web course has pop up handouts, test questions, a certificate of completion, feedback on wrong answers--the whole nine yards. And it's in sound. Click here to ask me to send it -- Dan, send me that free course link on Reasonable Suspicion