The take-up of the EAP Calculator comes in the wake of the Government’s Thriving at Work report - which claimed poor mental health was costing employers between £33 and £42 billion - calling for benchmarking of EAPs and more understanding among employers of the value and impact of wellbeing services.
Royal Mail Group, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and new railway operator MTR Crossrail are among those employers who have trialled the EAP Calculator.
Dr Shaun Davis, global director of safety, health, wellbeing & sustainability at Royal Mail Group, said: “Being able to analyse health data is vital to our health and wellbeing strategy of improving the health and wellbeing of our employees through the prevention of physical and mental harm. As a global organisation we wanted to support a worthwhile initiative like the EAP calculator because of the impact and benefits of EAPs not only to employers and their employees, but also the wider communities where people live.”
“Calculating ROI is important as this helps us to measure the real benefit of the offering to staff and the value to the business overall,” said Clara McSweeney, HR business partner, MTR Crossrail. “Using the calculator we can look at any trends within the data and then focus further wellbeing initiatives around trying to prevent the root causes of issues requiring EAP support.”
The EAP Calculator - available at www.eapa.org.uk - has been developed by the Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA) UK alongside the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) as an accessible tool that can fill the gap in knowledge and provide a standard measure for HR and benefits professionals.
Neil Mountford, chair of EAPA UK, said: “Employers bear much of the burden of the costs of ill-health, chronic disease and incapacity, and they need to start having a much better grasp of which interventions help them mitigate against these costs. Making a case for investment into something like support on mental health has meant scratching around for impact on absence rates or relying on intangibles like the value for engagement and employer branding.
“While EAPs are among the most commonly used wellbeing interventions in the UK with close to half of the workforce (a total of almost 14 million) having access to an EAP, very few providers or employers have been able to collect data beyond basic take-up and satisfaction surveys.”
Professor Stephen Bevan led the work at IES. “There’s limited existing evidence from UK employers on the actual value of the EAP - mostly only data from the very different context of the US. For example, one American study has suggested a range of between $4 and $10 return on a $1 investment in an EAP. Thriving at Work highlighted a significant return for employers investing in mental health interventions, an average of £4.20 for every £1 (with a range up to £9).
“We need to be gathering more insights into what’s going on in UK organisations. The more the EAP Calculator is used the richer the dataset will be for creating benchmarks, the greater the insight which can be used to refine and update the methods behind. The stronger the measure, the greater credibility the figures will have for use with board executives and for purchasing decisions both around EAPs and wellbeing strategies more widely.”