Employee Assistance Program Benefits; a High ROI

25 Feb Employee Assistance Program Benefits; a High ROI

Posted at 12:41h in Counseling, Critical Incident Response, EAP by Ryan Dame

An employee assistance program (EAP) not only has great benefits for your employees but also a great return on investment for your organization. As an HR Director, or upper level manager, it behooves you to understand what your EAP’s return on investment is, and how that EAP measures it. In this blog, we’ll give you tools and information about the value of precise measurement concerning ROI. Let’s get into all the details to help you to better understand.

A company will get an average ROI of $10,187.99 in productivity improvements per year for each employee who uses an EAP.

What’s the importance of ROI?

First, ROI is “a financial metric of profitability that is widely used to measure the return or gain from an investment” (investopedia.com). It is the ratio of what was gained from a specific investment relative to its cost and it gives you great insight into whether something you’re investing in is giving you your expected gains. Your business’s health is largely dependent on the success (or failures) of your financial decisions. ROI measures what is working with your investments and what is not.

Employee Assistance Program Benefits ROI

Specifically with EAP benefits, what does the Return on Investment look like? Many businesses will look into this before making a commitment. According to the Journal of Employee Assistance, when the data of 4,707 EAP clients in 2012 was investigated, it was found that a company would get an average ROI of $10,187.99 in productivity improvements per year for each employee who used an EAP. This study also found that upon employee completion of the EAP, employee absenteeism dropped by 32%, emotional well-being increased by 87%, and morale and motivation in the workplace improved by 51%. Productivity in the workplace was found to have increased by over 25%. These statistics are consistent with Care Plus Solutions’ own survey results as reported by our clients. With an effective and well-promoted EAP, your organization will see sizable ROI. According to businessgrouphealth.org, mental illness and substance abuse cost employers an estimated $80 to $100 billion annually in indirect costs alone. Be prepared to combat these issues with employee assistance program benefits.

Measuring EAP Services with the WOS-5

WOS stands for Workplace Outcome Suite. It’s original 25-item screening tool was developed by David A. Sharar, Ph.D. John Pompe, Psy.D., LP, SPHR, and Richard Lennox, Ph.D in 2012. In a study by Sharar and Lennox (2014), the researchers used a 5-item version known as the WOS-5 to determine if EAP services were effectively improving workplace outcomes. The tool measures work engagement, absenteeism, presenteeism, workplace distress, and life satisfaction. The results showed that absenteeism decreased by around 40%, presenteeism reduced by 25.3% and work engagement increased by 6.3%. Some other observations included a 24.2% decrease in work distress and a 13.3% increase in life satisfaction. These outcomes proved that an employee assistance program positively affects workplace outcomes.

Getting the Most Out of Your Investment

At Care Plus Solutions, we employ the WOS-5 as one of the ways we measure our EAP’s impact on your organization’s ROI. We simply administer this brief 5-item questionnaire with an employee before their use of our EAP services and then again 90 days after their use of our employee assistance program benefits. De-identified data is then submitted to the entity that created the WOS-5 to be analyzed.

Make sure that you ask your EAP Account Manager how they are measuring their results. In today’s age of data collection and fast access to information, your EAP has the ability to ensure reliable statistics that reflect your company’s ROI. You can always count on Care Plus Solutions to provide this to your company.