Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, this is your host Brandon Laws. Thanks for joining us today! First off, before we dive into today’s topic, and I’ve got a very special guest with me, I wanted to just mention that we would love to hear what you think about the podcast. We know you’re listening and we would love it if you went to iTunes or Stitcher, wherever you listen to the podcast, and give us a review. And be thoughtful about the review, doesn’t have to be five stars but we’d appreciate it if it was!
So with that, Lacey Halpern is our guest! We were just kind of joking before we started recording, this is Lacey’s 14th episode on HR for Small Business podcast. So congratulations Lacey!
Lacey: Thanks! I’m happy to be here, it’s fun!
Brandon: You actually brought this topic to me, it’s something that I think employers are thinking about as they are fighting for talent and as they’re having to create a bunch of different ways to create new benefits, we’ve thought, EAP, Employee Assistance Program. Give the listener a sense for what an EAP program is.
Lacey: Yeah, so EAP for those that haven’t ever heard of it, Employee Assistance Program, it’s an employer-sponsored benefit program, so that just means that the employer pays for it, and it’s a resource for employees and we can talk today about all the different types of things that an EAP can offer.
Brandon: Yeah, we should probably touch on that.
Lacey: I just think that this time of year, as we get closer to the holidays and you hear all the time about the strain that mental illness is putting on communities and the impact that can have on employers, I just think that this is a really great way that an employer can offer something that they can’t themselves provide to their people. And it’s just a really great benefit, and it can have some cool opportunities that an employer can take advantage of as well.
Brandon: So to give a kind of broad overview as to, we know this is an employer sponsored program, there’s a cost associated with it that likely the employers pay.
Lacey: There is.
Brandon: We’ll talk about that maybe in a little bit. But what is accessible? What can employees use?
Lacey: Lots! I think the thing that people most often think of when they hear Employee Assistance Program is counseling. So an Employee Assistance Program offers usually a few free sessions, sometimes it’s three per year, sometimes it’s six, it kind of depends on how the plan is set up by the employer. And what’s really nice is if the employer has a health plan, this can go really nicely in conjunction with it. So you have a medical plan for your employees and let’s say that plan offers some type of mental health services and
there’s maybe a copay. Well what an Employee Assistance Program can do is it can get an employee in the door with a counselor, face-to-face, one that’s either near their work or near their home, and then after those first few sessions are used—and again, there’s no cost to the employee for those 3 or 6 first sessions—then it can transfer pretty easily over to the health insurance, and then the employee’s just paying a copay for those services.And another thing that’s nice is when you call, when an employee calls the Employee Assistance Program, they’re actually usually talking to a live counselor. So the service that we offer, our employer group here at Xenium is Cascade Centers, and if an employee were to call Cascade Centers they would actually speak to a live counselor, someone who’s either got a Master’s Degree or gone to school for this.
Brandon: …is certified, a Ph.D.
Lacey: Yep! And they’re able to talk a little bit about what it is they’re dealing with and they can be matched up with a counselor that specializes in that area. Another thing that’s really unique to it is that there are some types of counseling services that are not covered under a medical plan, for example, parenting. Or if you were to go see a counselor for a relationship or marriage counseling, that’s not covered under medical insurance plans typically. So typically it would cover if I’m going to see a counselor for some diagnosed mental health condition for myself or one of my dependents that’s on the plan. I wouldn’t be able to take a spouse with me to go and sit together and talk about something. With an Employee Assistance Program, it’s absolutely covered, so those first few sessions would be covered for that.
Brandon: What I find interesting is that, yeah, you’d obviously have a gap in your health insurance plan for these sorts of things, but then when you think about how, okay, well I do need help with a problem I’m going through, maybe there’s been a death in the family I’m taking really hard or something where I would normally have to go and see a psychiatrist or something. I don’t even want to know what their billable rates are, I mean, it’s probably insane. But through a program like this, it sort of scales, is that what I’m understanding? There’s a cost associated with it that the employer’s paying. It’s sort of almost the same as the way a catastrophic insurance plan would be, not everyone’s going to use it likely, so that’s how they get the lower fees. So that way when those issues do come up, people can use it.
Lacey: Absolutely.
Brandon: These are qualified people.
Lacey: They really are. They’re quality individuals that are working for these organizations. There’s lots of different EAP providers out there. One thing that I’ll mention too is that I sometimes hear from employees that they’re nervous to call—I’m afraid my manager’s going to know that I’ve called! These are confidential resources. So when I go out and talk to employees about the benefit plan, and typically a good time to remind employees of this is to do it when you do your open enrollment for health insurance or maybe quarterly at team meetings, just making sure to remind employees of the benefit, because it’s sort of out of sight, out of mind—if you don’t need it, you’re not thinking about it. But when something, like you said, catastrophic happens or you’re dealing with maybe an anxiety issue that’s acute and not something you’ve been dealing with your whole life but something traumatic happens, maybe, and it brings it up, you can call, and you know that the counselor is not going to relay any information back to the employer.
The employer will sometimes find out the usage, so maybe how many employees have called and utilized, so they can determine is the benefit worth the cost. And again, these costs are nominal. They’re very, very low for an employer to take advantage of it.
Brandon: Give people a sense for the range, I’m sure it varies by EAP provider, but what’s your experience?
Lacey: My experience has been a few dollars a month per employee. So if you’ve got a group of 50 employees and you’re paying, let’s say $2 or $3 a month, I mean, we’re talking $100 to $150 a month for a benefit that’s available, and it’s a resource for the employer like I said, too. So we should probably talk about that, how an employer might access this.
Brandon: Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a little bit. I do want to keep touching on what sorts of things are available, because I know it’s not all negative stuff. It’s not all counseling.
Lacey: It’s not.
Brandon: Or things to help with the mental state. It’s really getting people through milestones in their life. My understanding of it is, like, I went through a home buying process about five, six years ago for the first time, and they had resources available.
Lacey: They do, yeah. It depends on the provider, but there are lots of different resources. So yes, counseling is one that is usually top of mind, but there are often financial resources, resources for employees who are struggling to find affordable housing—especially right now, people are talking about the rental market here in the Portland area. So if you’re an employer that’s here locally and you’ve got employees that are maybe struggling financially to find affordable housing, there’s resources here.
Domestic violence resources for employees and connecting employees with resources in the community to help them be successful.
Legal resources is another thing that I like to mention to employees. It depends on how the plan is set up, but I’ve often seen it where an employee might get a couple phone calls to an attorney for maybe 30 minutes to sort of get a sense of maybe their situation and where to go. And that’s saving your employee sometimes between $300-500 for that phone call, so we talk about how do we set ourselves up to be an employer of choice. And you might roll this out to employees and you might not get a standing ovation from your people, let’s just be honest. But for those employees that do access it, they remember it and they may talk about it to the community, to the people that they know that, I got to go talk to a counselor 3 times and it really made a difference in my ability to be effective at work! That’s another thing. So they can call and sometimes it doesn’t even require going in to talk to someone. So it might be a phone call with an attorney, it might actually be a phone call to one of the counselors in the EAP program. So they have offices. Each provider’s different, like I said, but some of them have counselors that are available to do phone calls. Some of them have even gone so far as setting up online chatting for people that have really busy work or life schedules and they can’t make it out to see a counselor.
Brandon: My understanding is that they’ll meet you wherever you are, so whether it’s an in-person if you love that, instant messaging—I know a lot of us millennials, we love that. Maybe video chat, too. I’m sure these EAP providers adapt to whoever their participants are.
Lacey: They absolutely are. And I think you can customize the plans so that it fits you. So if you know that your group of employees may not access a particular part of the benefit plan, then you may be able to talk with that provider to say, You know, we’d like to offer 6 sessions of free counseling and we don’t think that this piece of your plan works for us. So I would really have those conversations with the provider if you are setting that.
Brandon: Now let’s talk about what you had just mentioned a couple of minutes ago, which was, what would drive an employer to choose an employer like this, and then how do they get started in it? Sometimes for employers, and sadly we’ve seen cases where they bring it in because there’s an incident at the workplace. Those things happen and an EAP can really help mitigate those emotions that everybody’s feeling or walk people through those stages of emotions.
In other cases, they’re being proactive about it. Maybe talk about the spectrum of employers using the EAP.
Lacey: Yeah, let’s talk about the reactive way you might use it as an employer. So like you said, maybe something traumatic happens in the workplace, or I’ve had it where a client had an employee that was pretty well known at the business pass away. And so they brought in an EAP counselor to just be available for a few hours so employees could go and talk to this person if they wanted to and take advantage of that in a private room at the worksite. The other way you might use it reactively is to use a management referral. So for the listeners out there that aren’t familiar with that, you might have a high performing employee that meets all essential functions of their job, they perform their job very well, and maybe there’s an incident that happens where an employee engages in, let’s say, inappropriate behavior and has some type of outburst that’s maybe generated because they’re angry, they’ve got personal stuff going on.
You’re faced with a decision, right? You have to manage the risk in your workplace, ensure it’s safe for everybody, so does that mean we have to terminate an employee? Sometimes. I’ve seen it be really successful though where we know this is not the employee’s general nature, they’ve never had behavior like this before, and we know that giving
them a final warning or terminating them isn’t going to help them to be successful. We recognize that they need resources and tools that a manager or a supervisor isn’t equipped to provide. And we often don’t want our managers or supervisors talking about those really personal things that an employee might be going through, so by doing a management referral, what that looks like is for—and, you know, the cost varies depending on the provider and what you’re accessing, but let’s just say for a few hundred dollars your employer can reach out to an EAP provider, explain to the employee that their continued employment is conditional on reaching out to the provider, getting assessed. The provider will determine what the employee needs to be successful, and the provider will often talk to the manager about the incident—What happened? What’s it like to work with this employee? What’s their pattern been here at the worksite? And then the employee is required to stay compliant with the recommendations. So if the provider that did the assessments says, They need to go to counseling for once a week for 3 months, that employee has to go to counseling once a week for three months. And all the employer is notified of is of is whether the employee is compliant or not. Not how many times they’re going.Brandon: Or what they’re talking about.
Lacey: Yep! We don’t get what they’re talking about, we don’t actually find out what the plan is, just whether or not they’re staying compliant with the plan. And what I’ve seen is that the employee’s able to address things that maybe even they didn’t realize were going on for them, they can be successful and productive at work and you’ve retained an employee and we talk about how hard it is to find talent. For your high performing employees, it’s a great tool.
You can also use it if you’re an employer that does drug testing. So let’s say you have a program where you do random drug testing or post-accident, even. You have a high performing employee, they get called on the random, and let’s say they test positive for something. And you know this employee has been high functioning, you had no signs that they were under the influence. Maybe they use a particular drug not before they come to work so they’re not actually impaired while they’re working. You may decide to do a management referral and last chance agreement. So that would entail the employee, again, agreeing that if they don’t stay compliant, they don’t have a job anymore. They may be subject to more frequent randoms than the rest of your group and they have to go and be assessed by a drug and alcohol counselor to see if there’s treatment that that employee needs to undergo. It may be inpatient where they have to go somewhere, and they may take a leave of absence, family medical leave to do that. Or maybe it’s that they have to go to some meetings a couple times a week or see a counselor, but they’d have to stay compliant and the employer would know whether they were or not.
Brandon: On the proactive side of having a program like this, I could imagine where employers that there’s this long list of benefits that they offer to try to be competitive and retain employees, the competition’s offering so many creative benefits nowadays and I think a program like this could work, and I know it works. But for the employers that sign up for a program like this and don’t use it, don’t really educate their employees, I can imagine that’d be a problem. What are some ways where, and it doesn’t have to be this benefit necessarily, it could be any benefit that employers are offering, what are good ways to communicate and keep people educated on how to use the program, what’s available to them? Because if you want them to be happy in their roles and solve all of life’s problems that get thrown at you, we just need to have employees take advantage of this.
Lacey: Yeah, and making sure it’s top of mind means talking about it. So, like I said, I think in meetings, reminding employees of the benefit and what it is, I just recently had one of the representatives from the EAP plan one of my clients uses come out for 10 minutes at their weekly stand-up meeting that they do and we talked about what the benefit was and at the end of it one of the owners said, “I am so glad that we did this! I didn’t even realize all of the benefits that were available.”
Brandon: That’s crazy!
Lacey: I know! They signed up for this program for their people maybe six, seven years ago and you just lose sight of it. So talking about it, making sure somebody is educated about it that goes over it in new hire orientations, advertising it in your job postings, even, if you talk about benefits. If you have a total rewards benefits summary, mentioning it in that I
think is a great way. And some EAP programs will do brown bag lunches, so maybe the EAP program or the provider you have offers that, so maybe they’re going to do one on financial awareness or taxes during first quarter. So they might have somebody that could come out for an hour and employees can voluntarily decide to have their lunch at that time and sit down and hear about it. So then I’m thinking, Wow, this is a great thing! The company just paid to have this person who’s super educated about this topic come in and talk to me! I didn’t have to leave work, I didn’t have to spend my gas driving somewhere and calendar it out when I have kids and all this other stuff going on. So that’s one way to keep it. Plus you’re educating your employees, and when employees are educated they make better choices. When they’re happy and productive outside of work, generally we see that productivity in the workplace is at a high.Brandon: Awesome. Well this has been a pretty enlightening subject. EAP’s not something that’s top of mind for me even, and we have this benefit! But you’ve shed some light on that. Any parting thoughts for employers, HR managers that are listening that just want to pay attention to? Where to go, more resources?
Lacey: You know, we have some information on our Xenium website about EAP, so I’d go there. And I would talk to your broker, so your benefits broker should be able to connect you with an EAP program in your area. And just talk to your people and your employees, I think they’ve got a lot of good resources and information about what they’d like to see.
Brandon: See what they want, yeah.
Lacey: So talk to them and get a sense from them if they’d benefit. Again, it’s a nominal fee and a great way to retain and support your employees just in their general well-being.
Brandon: Awesome. Lacey Halpern, thanks for joining the podcast, appreciate it!
Lacey: Glad to be here!