Employee Assistance Program Resources and Essential EAP Training for Employees and Supervisors to Maximize Help

Employee Assistance Program Resources and Essential EAP Training for Employees and Supervisors to Maximize Help: EAP resources for employee assistance programs for training supervisors, offering ways the EAP can help, and deliver EAP refresher Training

Use Reproducible Tip Sheets from WorkExcel.com

People ask about our reproducible EA: tip sheets which are editable for EAPs and restrictions on use. Here is information to help you. I am posting this for clarification in event you have any questions.

All EAP workplace wellness tip sheets distributed by DFA Publishing and Consulting, LLC are originally authored. Free tip sheets we distribute online may be redistributed without limitation to anyone. The purchased tips sheets have limitations as discussed below. Any tip sheet, free or purchased, may be edited or amended as desired, however the copyright notice must remain. You may place your program’s name on tip sheets (free or otherwise), along with your phone number or your logo in promoting your services or program.

A live link to our Web site is appreciated because it helps search engines find us and makes the Web site more popular with searches...thanks! Purchased tips sheets at WorkExcel.com or  are for the purchaser’s internal use for distribution to employees and/or family members, or for internal or external employee assistance program providers unaffiliated with insurance or managed care organizations, with multiple work organizations that are contracted customers. Do not redistribute the editable format. Instead, create a PDF and use it.

Using tip sheets means you accept the following statement: Information in tip sheets is provided with the understanding that the author and the publisher are not engaged in rendering legal or other professional services, especially with regard to a specific person, problem, health, or wellness concern, circumstance, or topic. Information is for general informational purposes.

Tip sheet information is not a substitute for competent legal, EAP, or other professional advice. You should approve content of tip sheets before distribution to employees, customers, or other persons. If you are an EAP or other wellness professional, feel free to add you own input. This is why I created them--so you could advance your program with ready-made materials, but still include your expertise.

Purchased tip sheets may be posted on protected page of a customer’s Web site, but you may not post on the World Wide Web and make the content accessible to anyone in world who may stumble upon it. Free tip sheets do not have this restriction. Please use a embedded link to WorkExcel.com, if possible, as mentioned above. You can find all the topic listed here.

Respect in the Workplace PowerPoint Training with Supervisor's Role Module

Mastering the Respectful Workplace: 10 Tips to Boost Productivity and Morale
This course from WorkExcel.com gives you 10 tips to improve morale, attitude and performance at work by mastering the art of respectful behavior.

As much as employees try to show respect for others through their actions, some subtle (or not so subtle) misguided behaviors can sabotage any employee's reputation and your effectiveness.

In this program, employees learn to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate behavior and gain awareness so they make all the right moves.

High-achieving professionals seek continual improvement in their work product and their ability to collaborate with others, and the 10 tips in this course will reinforce success in both areas.

When employees treat everyone with respect, their positive behavior influences others throughout the organization and positive work culture begins to form.

Conversely, disrespectful behavior can prove especially disruptive. Through what’s called the "bystander effect,” co-workers who witness another coworker's adverse actions may feel hurt, anger and lower morale.

Speaking of morale, there’s a connection between the impact of disrespectful behavior on an employer (in terms of productivity and financial under-performance) and the collective spirit of the workforce.

Engaging in harassment or ridicule--or simply violating others’ space--can trigger a downhill spiral that not only undermines one's credibility but harms everyone's work experience.

So this Respect in the Workplace PowerPoint course includes true-false questions to help employees apply what they learn.

Train and Educate Employees about Depression Using Multiple Touch Points: Video, DVD, Web Course and Handouts

Training and educating of employees that helps them consider their mental health needs may seem like something that has nothing to do with the employer's primary business purpose. Many managers and leadership staff are still vehemently against wandering into these areas of employee wellness, even though employee assistance programs have been around over 40 years. But they adopt this attitude at their own peril.

At a television set manufacturing facility, would a furnace with a leaking gas line, or a truck with worn out brake pads on in the parking, both which can lead to
http://www.workexcel.com/content/p-depression-full-mkd-lnks-to-disc-blog/presentation.html
a catastrophe, be the employer's business if the mission of the organization is primarily selling televisions? Of course it is their business. The furnace and the truck are resources possessed by the organization, and maintaining them requires attention to problems they experience so even bigger problems aren't experienced that literally in this case blow up the bottom line.Employees are an organization's most valuable resource, so let's talk about mental health and the problems employees can experience, and educate them to self-diagnose and motivate them further to seek help via the EAP. Depression . . .[read more ]

Could Property Casualty Insurers Be the EAP Profession's Ship Coming In?

Certainly, you know that the Property Casualty (P-C) insurance is a world away from Health Insurance and their managed behavioral care partners, correct?

P-C insurers are folks like Lloyds of London, AIG, and Hartford who worry about a fire burning the building down where your EAP office is located. They also worry about things like lawsuits for wrong termination, automobile and truck wrecks, lawsuit payouts for sexual harassment, and workers' compensation payouts when employees prove they have been cheated. Lawsuits for trips and falls, employment practices liability, and theft of tools--yep, they insure against these types of losses too--almost anything other than employee behavioral health.

And workplace violence, when it happens, someone getting shot, and families suing over their grieved relatives...who pays? It's not United Healthcare. It's these big boys with P-C.

Now stick with me on this post.While managed behavioral health care wants one thing from an EAP--assessment and avoidance of access to the employee's insurance afforded by the behavioral health plan if possible, (thanks to an EAP's assessment and short term counseling skills within the core technology), a property casualty insurance company would want everything it could possibly wring out of your EAP in order to target as many behavioral risk exposures as possible in an effort to prevent insurable and compensable losses. (Please read that again and consider the implications.)

Human behavior in the workplace contributes to many liabilities and exposures, and all of these risks are born by insurance premiums. They also come with high deductibles--like $25-$50,000 for a lawsuit associated with sexual harassment.

Back injury and lengthy periods of time out of work, the P-C pays. Sexual harassment by a supervisor? Yes, the P-C pays.

And the $1 million out of court settlement instead of the risk of $5 million in a jury trial? Yes, again, the P-C forks over the cash.

Now imagine a well integrated EAP able to educate supervisors, detect emerging risks, and go anywhere within an organization necessary to engage and discover, educate, and train, assess and consult, and all with the purpose of reducing losses. How much might this sort of "human factors exposures prevention" be worth?

My guess is a lot, because the stakes are enormous. This is could also be a renaissance for EAPs. Am I wrong?

It's time to engage this tremendously financially liquid world of P-C. There are thousands of brokers nationwide. They know nothing about EAPs (other than the # on the back of their own insurance card in the event of an alcohol or psychiatric issue.)

There is a potentially wide-open avenue for EAPs to grow and flourish in ways that have not been seen for quite awhile, I think.

Write me at publisher@workexcel.com if you think I am off base about this. I wouldn't have written this much except for one thing. In 1993, I went to one of the most competitive EAP markets in the U.S. (Denver) and I engaged with a property casualty insurance broker there. I trained insurance agents all about EAPs in about three hours so they could offer these tools to customers. A week later, I returned and picked up three checks from three different companies averaging 100 employees each who had never had a comprehensive EAP. No lie.

I then flew to Baltimore, MD to the corporate headquarters of NSF&G Insurance, and within their boardroom made a presentation to talk them into beginning an EAP division and hiring real core tech pros. They listened, but their staff turned over, and I was full time employed at Arlington Hospital, and couldn't do it all myself at the time.. But this opportunity still lingers.

Mark Attridge's (hats off to him) awesome article in the Jan 2017 Journal of Employee Assistance discusses the obvious difference between a free EAP and a for-fee EAP, and the 400% improved utilization that one could expect from the latter. Mark shy's away from calling these managed-care driven programs. This is a disappointment and the elephant in the living room. But his research is solid content for EAPs seeking a new home in the risk world--one where they will be full appreciated. See my 2002 article on this topic here that discusses these issues more directly EAPs Help Limit Behavioral Exposures from the NATIONAL UNDERWRITER INSURANCE MAGAZINE

Increase EAP Utilization Hack #18: Ask Satisfied EAP Clients to Refer Others On Their Way Out the Door

This is the simplest and easiest way to increase EAP utilization--ask satisfied clients to refer coworkers or peers to the EAP as they leave your office. And for the booster tip: Tell your satisfied client to tell other employees that the EAP is confidential--really confidential to the fullest extent of the law. Short tip, but marketing confidentiality works better coming from a client who happens to disclose their EAP participation than it does from an EAP Poster. And, of course, this boosts EAP utilization rates.

Increase EAP Utilization Hack #14: Conduct Refresher Training for Supervisors in Using the EAP Properly

Let's continue with EAP Utilization Hack #17 (I accidentally skipped a number.) We are counting down ot #1. We're talking EAP refresher training. This is critical for EAPs, but few formally do it. It's guaranteed to boost utilization, both of self-referred employees and supervisor-referred employees. Refresher training is follow-up training that allows supervisors to examine their experiences in using the EAP over a defined period of time.

The goal of refresher training is to learn how to use the EAP effectively, manage difficult employees with greater ease, and clear up questions, misconceptions, or roadblocks common among supervisors that typically interfere with, or inhibit use of the program. Refresher training reduces risk to the organization because it increases the likelihood of employees with serious troubles getting referred.

Print brochure for WorkExcel.com "EAP Refresher Training" product.

For example, a supervisor meets with an employee and formally refers him or her to the EAP, but fails to phone the EAP first, send documentation, or request that a release be signed. The supervisor than hears nothing back, phones the EAP, can't get information because no release exists, experiences frustration concluding that the program is not very helpful.

When conducting refresher training, include lots of discussion around hypothetical referral scenarios, and education about common issues that interfere with referral:

Ideas for EAP Refresher Training! Put together your own program using these concepts below or consider use of WorkExcel.com materials.

1) Discuss the need to refer early and why. Discuss the ramifications and risk associated with delay
2) Discuss importance of communicating with the EAP before, during, and after the referral--not about the nature of the employees programs, but the the mechanics of communication, both when, why, and how all with the goal of helping the employee and salvaging valuable workers.
3) Explain the parameters and dynamics of the signed release
4) Clarify what is meant by mandatory referral, formal referral, informal referrals, last chance agreements, and firm choice agreements. Many supervisors confuse these terms and they all have different meanings and implications in the management of troubled employees.
5) Talk about reducing emotional involvement, unbridled anger, and power struggles with employees.
6) Talk about how to maintain control of the communication and verification process with the EAP.
7) Discuss manipulation to avoid referral and later employee failure to follow-up with EAP recommendations
8) See the products associated with refresher training at this link.