Alejandra Inés Lacroze

Case: PAE (Employee Assistance Program)

Motivation for an Employee Assistance Program

In order to get a better understanding of the Employee Assistance  Program (EAP), we need to get back to its origins. Without knowledge of the successes and failures of traditional programs, it is difficult to appreciate an EAP.

This concept does not appear spontaneously, but as a result of the evolution of its predecessor: Alcoholism Occupational Program.

In 1940, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was recognized in the USA as an effective program to recover alcoholics. Then, some companies allowed their employees to get back to work when they were able to demonstrate that they could keep sobriety, with the help of AA. It was found that changes in lifestyle and productivity were really extraordinary.

Companies then thought that this recovered alcoholics could potentially participate in the process of identification, by recognizing employees with problems and motivating them to seek help before their work gets affected. As this concept evolved, an idea emerged that supervisors could be trained in the alcoholism symptomatology of their teams.

As years passed the difficulty this approach presented was that alcoholics detected were only employees that were below the supervisor level. A supervisor could not approach the Vice-President to tell him that he had problems with alcohol.

A second type of problem appeared in this program: many years pass until those employees that have problems with alcohol loose control in their jobs and start to show the symptoms of the last phase of alcoholism in which the program focuses. For example, many programs pay great attention in the absenteeism, while this behavior does not appear in the early stages of the disease.

A third problem that appeared in the tradition Alcoholism program, is that alcoholics have great skills to convince their peers that the cause of their way of drinking is their wife, an unmanageable child, economic distress, etc. When a supervisor with one or two hours of training in alcoholism symptoms faces a skilled alcoholic that has been keeping excuses for years, the supervisor almost always looses. When the alcoholic finishes his story, the supervisor is already empathetic with him and convinces himself that anyone with those problems will drink. Then, after a couple or three of such confrontations, the supervisor gets to the old habit of “protecting” the alcoholic. Alcoholism keeps growing until the final stages and then everyone looses (the employee and the company: production and money).

Finally, because of the stigma of this disease, supervisors wanted to be sure that alcoholism was really the problem. They waited until the employee showed the severe symptoms of the last phase and the result was an ultimatum to stop drinking or get fired, which is similar to ask for a tuberculous to stop coughing or he will get fired.

In 1960, programs started to take focus out of the symptomatology of alcoholism and move it to the performance degradation at work caused by alcoholism.

In spite of this, although supervisors tried to avoid discussing with an employee whether he was alcoholic or not, they were still trained in the symptomatology of alcoholism and knew when the performance degradation was caused by this disease. The only place where they were derived was an alcoholism specialist and the only problem for which their employees were derived was alcoholism.

Supervisors, then, did not derive anyone until after they were absolutely sure that the employee had a problem with alcohol, and if the supervisor himself had problems with alcohol, he would simply not derive anyone.

In spite of the difficulties that this program presented, recovery rates on identified employees were up by 50% to 80%, compared to the 20% to 40% of previous programs.

The problem that continued to occur was that identification was generally performed at the final stage. Very often employees were with their capabilities for working completely diminished before getting help and were totally destroyed.

In 1972, the Occupational Branch of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism studied the amount of Employee Programs at the national level. Of the approximately 300 companies that had written policies, only a fraction of these programs were showing success. Fortunately, there were some common elements that were identified on such programs. It is no those aspects that the Employee Assistance Program concept is based.