Alejandra Inés Lacroze

Case: PAE (Employee Assistance Program)

The EAP concept

The name (Employee Assistance Program) is deliberately ample for two reasons: First, the program is conceived to assist employees that have performance problems at work as well as those that are having them as a result of personal problems. It does not matter what the problem is. Consequently identifying the program with only one disorder would be inappropriate.  Second, one of the major concerns of the EAP is to help alcoholics and experience shows that people that have problems with alcohol do not respond to programs with the “alcohol” word on them. When those terms exist, these employees, which are the ones that need the program the most, tend to avoid it (it is important to recall the denial as one of the most important characteristics of addiction).

The objective of the EAP is to assist the greatest amount of addicts, CONFIDENTIALLY, that have yet not been identified for not matching to the alcoholic or addict stereotype. This large segment has been estimated to be more than 95% of the total population of addict employees. This does not mean that the program will not take charge of the remaining 5% whose problems are observable and obvious to anyone. What we want to stress is that the goal of the EAP is to act as an instrument of early identification.

It is also true that not all of the people that have problems with alcohol have problems at work in the early stages of the disease. Therefore, many experts wonder if the model of performance at work, as the only indicator, actually delays the detection of these problems.

Experience shows that it may or may not, depending of the circumstances and the type of work. Certainly, according to Dr. Maxwell, the pattern of performance at work is observable. Unfortunately, when there is no EAP in place these observations are made retrospectively.

The effectiveness of an EAP resides in that the employer controls what the employee does not want to loose: wages. The possibility for loosing a job could be a strong motivation to ask for help.

It is also universally accepted that the earlier a problem is identified, the better the possibilities to solve it.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism warns that delay could reduce the rate of potential recovery from 80% to 15% or less. It is in the early identification were EAP can be more effective. As identification is less stigmatic with an EAP, it could be done earlier.

The Employee Assistance Program is a Management Control System designed for the early identification of employees whose problems damage their performance at work and consequently is motivated to get help for recovery.

It is necessary to keep a well trained person, reachable to employees, so they could approach him with their problems. Without such a person, the EAP does not work.

At the same time, no results will be obtained, even while having an ample program and a skilled person to diagnose and mentor over a wide variety of problems, if the resources of rehabilitation are insufficient.

In the absence of a formal program, both employees as well as management, pay daily the consequences of these unsolved problems: degraded performance, illness absences and grievance are among them.

When the problem is alcoholism or any other addiction, an employee that earns USD 18,000 a year, could cost the company between USD 50,000 and USD 75,000 only in losses related to productivity.

This amount is much bigger, if we consider the costs of medical care, rework, training of another employee for replacement. The cost of problems with peers at work, that have to perform part of the work assigned to an affected employee, is really difficult to estimate.