Towards Culturally Sensitive EAP Counseling for Chinese in Hong Kong

Abstract

With the economic recession in Hong Kong, employee assistance programs (EAP) have become increasingly imperative. This paper reviews the existing methods of operation of EAP counseling in Hong Kong. Two models of operation-internal and external-are identified. While each model has its strengths and weaknesses, neither has taken into account the importance of cultural context. Most EAP counseling services in Hong Kong reflect an unrefined attempt to adapt Western theories to the Chinese cultural context of Hong Kong. The result is often a mismatch between the theoretical framework and the cultural realities. This paper suggests a non-normative, culturally sensitive model that concentrates on the strengths of the employees and the organization. The model is based on a solution-focused framework that integrates cultural, organizational factors and intervention approaches.     

The Role of Supervisory Referral in Employee Assistance Programs

Abstract

A growing number of organizations offer Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) to help employees with their personal problems. Many organizations rely on their supervisors to help identify and refer troubled employees to the EAP for assistance, yet very little conclusive evidence exists regarding the factors that influence whether or not supervisors identify and intervene with troubled employees. A previous review of the literature (Nord & Littrell, 1989) found that the following variables were consistently related to referral: (a) degree of management support for the EAP, (b) gender of supervisor, (c) gender of subordinate, (d) existence of a supervisor network, (e) occupational category of the employees supervised, (f) social distance between supervisor and troubled employee, (g) supervisors' attitude toward their role in referral, and (h) supervisor knowledge of the EAP. However, results of some of the studies reviewed for the current paper were inconsistent with Nord and Littrell's (1989) findings. Additional research is needed in this area, including research on the effectiveness of EAP supervisory training, in order to provide guidelines for the administration of effective EAP programs.     

Evaluation of an employee assistance program at a transportation company

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) in terms of selected work performance indicators and treatment outcomes. Three primary data sources were utilized: a questionnaire administered to EAP users, reports from EAP counsellors on treatment diagnoses and outcomes, and employee records on absenteeism and other performance criteria over a five year time period. On the whole, EAP clients reported very favourable outcomes regarding the quality of services and improved well being, and the counsellors reported successful treatment outcomes. However, employee records on performance outcomes indicated that EAP clients had higher rates of problems before, during and after treatment, compared to a matched control group. Additionally, rates of sick days significantly increased from before to after treatment among EAP users.     

Workplace Problems and Needs for Lesbian and Gay Male Employees

Abstract

This article presents research findings pursuant to the problems and needs of lesbian and gay male employees, as perceived from a randomly selected national sample of employee assistance professionals. The research was based on a conceptual model for framing workplace interventions addressing issues of protection, inclusion and equity (PIE) for gay/lesbian employees. Findings indicate that heterosexual employees greatly underestimate the level of discrimination sexual minorities experience; women respondents were more sensitive to gay/ lesbian workplace issues than men; existing EAP and human resource services, programs and policies inadequately address gay/lesbian needs; significant differences exist between heterosexual and gay/lesbian employees' on perceptions of diversity training content and gay/lesbian EAP professionals feel the workplace is only somewhat “safe” for them as sexual minority employees.     

Impaired Job Performance and Worksite Trigger Incidents:

Relatively little empirical research has been done on the supervisory referral of employees to employee assistance programs (EAPs). Inclusion of constructive confrontation (supervisory referral) into program standards and its continued promotion as "central strategy" of program theory and operation calls for critical investigation of supervisors' referral behavior, factors affecting their use of the strategy, and its effectiveness with the referred employees. This study examined two factors found to influence referral action-job performance and occurrence of an incident at the worksite which serves as a "trigger event" for the supervisor. Supervisors (N = 415) at 25 sites from seven organizations responded to a survey regarding their referral behavior. Both impaired job performance and worksite incidents were found to have significant relationship to the EAP referral handling of a specific "job problems" employee. Reported occurrence of a dramatic worksite incident accounted for about eight times as much of the observed referral index variance as a job performance (impairment) rating scale. An interesting, but statistically nonsignificant, trend was also found - the more "public" the incident, the greater the referral action taken. About half of the respondent supervisors were found to have taken no referral action whatever with their "job problems" subordinate. These findings raise questions about supervisors' perceptions of EAPs and their motivations in referral. More research into referral dynamics is needed if EAPs are to achieve their potential to help impaired workers and maximize cost savings for their host organizations.     

Case Studies of Federal Occupational Health's EAP Responses to Natural Disasters

Summary

Employee assistance professionals have increasingly been called upon to address the emotional and mental health needs of customer organizations and their employees in response to large-scale natural or man-made disasters. In doing so, employee assistance program (EAP) professionals must use a repertoire of responses that encompasses a broad range of interventions, generally anchored in an understanding of and focus on the organization and its culture, mission, management and labor concerns, and other critical characteristics. The EAP's fallback response to a crisis affecting the workplace is often a critical incident stress debriefing or close variant of it. However, EAPs can best serve their customers at all levels with interventions attuned to an understanding of the workplace culture gained through a consultative relationship with management, while factoring in the nature of the disaster, the length of time and characteristics of the disaster's aftermath, and the nuances of the employees' physical and emotional needs throughout the entire disaster response and recovery process.

This article highlights these issues through the presentation of two case studies, gained from the hurricane response activities of the Federal Occupational Health (FOH) EAP. FOH, a service unit within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Program Support Center, has 60 years of experience working in partnership with its federal agency customers to deliver comprehensive occupational health services to improve the health, safety, and productivity of the federal workforce. FOH's EAP contracts with vendor organizations to provide direct employee assistance, work/life, and related services to more than 1.3 million federal employees. The first case study describes (from the first person perspective) an on-site, multi-focused EAP intervention at a federal facility. The second case study describes management consultation with the U.S. Postal Service in response to major hurricane activity.     

The Role of Needs Assessment in the Design of Employee Assistance Programs:

This paper describes the value of a multimethod needs assessment in developing and tailoring an employee assistance program (EAP) to the particular characteristics, problems, and resources of an organization and then provides an illustration of an EAP needs assessment conducted for a city municipality. Unique concerns of city employees, and the specific EAP programs designed to address these concerns, are highlighted.     

Evaluating Organizations Through an Employee Assistance Program Using an Organization Development Model

This article describes one of the first accounts of an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) staffed by a social worker in industry in the United States. The author was the social worker employed in this EAP (called the Industrial Social Work Project) which was originally motivated by a vice president's concern over employee turnover. The article describes in detail how the EAP was operationalized and used to evaluate the organizational culture by using an organizational development model which involved five overlapping phases. These were: (1) orientation/information gathering; (2) individual treatment; (3) research on cultural change; (4) team building and O.D. projects; and (5) O.D. management training. The main contention of this article is that organizations do in fact contribute to the "professional suicide" of employees, and those who plan to evaluate ENS are remiss not considering the organization context of such programs and their possible impact on employees.     

The Relationship Between Referral Types,Work Performance,and Employee Problems

The relationship between the types of supervisory referrals and self-referrals to an employee assistance program to the work performance and kinds of personal problems of the employees referred is examined. For formal supervisory referrals Absenteeism was the most common work performance problems; for informal supervisory referrals Awareness of Slipping was the reason most commonly noted: and for self-referrals Interpersonal Relations problems predominated. Among employees wih alcohol and drug problems, more were self-referred than formally or informally referred by supervisors.     

Resistant Employees

The goal of Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) is to assist employees with a host of emotional, behavior, and family problems which interfere with their ability to function optimally on the job (Sussal & Ojakian, 1988). EAP counselors work to quickly identify, assess and resolve employees' problems. Frequently, there are employees, who seek EAP assistance, but are resistant to changing their behavior. The purpose of this article is to propose the use of Brief Counseling (BC) intervention techniques with resistant employees.     

Needs Assessment for a University-Based Employee Assistance Program

Between 10-20 percent of the total employee population in any institution of higher education are troubled employees. The lack of visibility and the absence of structure, especially in faculty positions, are risk factors. Higher education has become proactive in developing Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) in response to organizational personnel problems. A needs assessment survey was conducted to ascertain the need for a university-based EAP in a state university in southern California. The findings suggested that EAP services were needed.     

A Brief Overview of Research Techniques Used to Evaluate Three Employee Assistance Programs Through the Family Service Association of Metropolitan Toronto Experience

This article describes three models of Employee Assistance Program (EAP) evaluations used by the Family Service Association of Metropolitan Toronto, a major provider of national EAPs in Canada. Each EAP and their subsequent evaluation is tailored to the specific needs of the different organizations. Example l focuses on a case by case review. Example 2 describes a method of determining how well the EAP reaches troubled employees and comments on the effectiveness of the intervention. Example 3 describes how a simple but effective user survey provides information for evaluation purposes. These three evaluation models are examples of how EAPs and their evaluations respond to the uniqueness of various organizations and their respective client groups.     

A Systems Theory Analysis of Employee Assistance Programs

The systems theory principles of wholeness or nonsummativity, dynamic equilibration, nonlinear causality, feedback, equifinality, and permeable boundaries are described with conceptual and practical implications for employee assistance programs. Ten interfacing macrosystems relevant to EAP work are identified (e.g., employees; families; supervisors and management; unions; business community), and ways to account for and address the diverse agendas of these systems in EAP practice are discussed.     

Results

ABSTRACT

Corporations today are expecting employees to assume greater independence in the management of their own careers. This paper discusses ways that employees can become more empowered in response to the paradigm shift occurring in their work-lives. We suggest that group work intervention can facilitate conditions conducive to empowerment by focussing on the opportunities that employees have to develop a sense of personal control, and their inclination and capability to do so. Moreover, as EAP group workers trying to be supportive, we must be careful not to unintentionally engender continued dependency on the organization.     

Chapter 2: The Business Case for the Integration of Employee Assistance,Work-Life and Wellness Services

SUMMARY

Employee assistance programs (EAP), work-life programs and wellness programs are three commonly provided kinds of interventions that have the goals of reducing healthcare costs, improving employee performance and fostering a healthier workplace culture. The integration of these kinds of programs is a recent trend that has the potential to offer additional synergistic benefits. New studies have linked comprehensive delivery services that support human capital needs with bottom-line financial success of the company. This evidence can be used to make the business case for offering EAP, work-life and wellness services in an integrated capacity. However, while promising, the scientific evidence thus far in this area has methodological limitations and there are critical aspects that require further study.     

Transformational leadership and job satisfaction of police officers (carabineros) in Chile: the mediating effects of group identification and work engagement / Liderazgo transformacional y satisfacción laboral en carabineros de Chile: los efectos mediadores de la identificación con el grupo y el work engagement

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and work satisfaction, as well as to analyse the mediating role of group identification and work engagement in a police training process at a Chilean professional military institution. The sample was made up of 985 candidates representing all the candidates that joined the units of the country in the different locations. Officers and non-commissioned officers acting as instructors were considered ‘leaders’, while their ‘followers’ were the young candidates in the training period. It was found that all the relevant variables were positively and significantly interrelated, and a model of structural equations revealed that both work engagement and group identification played a mediating role in the relationship between transformational leadership and work satisfaction.     

The EAP Treatment of Depressed Employees

Abstract

This article applies calculations from the outcome literature on lost productive work time to the EAP treatment of depressed employees. Pre-and post-treatment measures were obtained on 11,756 employees who accessed treatment over a seven-year period. Sixty-six percent of these employees reported at least moderate symptoms of depression at the time of intake. After treatment, approximately half of the depressed subjects reported no such symptoms. Applying results from research conducted by Stewart, Ricci, Chee, Hahn, and Morganstein (2003) to the present study indicated substantial cost savings associated with the EAP treatment of depression. The article provides a model for calculating return on investment (ROI) by reducing lost productive work time (LPT).     

Family Roles as Moderators of the Relationship Between Schedule Flexibility and Stress

Employer initiatives that address the spillover of work strain onto family life include flexible work schedules. This study explored the mediating role of negative work–family spillover in the relationship between schedule flexibility and employee stress and the moderating roles of gender, family workload, and single‐parent status. Data were drawn from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, a nationally representative sample of working adults (N = 2,769). The results indicated that schedule flexibility was associated with less employee stress and that these associations were mediated by perceptions of negative work–family spillover. This study found the moderating relationships of gender, family workload, and single parenting in the relationships between schedule flexibility and negative work–family spillover and stress. Schedule flexibility had stronger relationships in reducing negative work–family spillover and stress among women, single parents, and employees with heavier family workloads. The findings provide empirical support for intervention efforts involving schedule flexibility to reduce workplace stress among employees with family responsibilities.     

Promoting Employee Assistance Program Services to Employees

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of various types of employee assistance promotional tools, including the types of promotion used and their relationship to program type (internal or external), program utilization, and promotional budget.

Our study suggests that a variety of tools are used by both internal and external EAPs. Employee and supervisor training is the most popular form of program promotion. Statistically significant relationships were found between program utilization rates and several types of promotional activities. Our research suggests that promotional materials affect EAP utilization rates, and consequently, the interaction between promotional activities and/or promotional materials and EAP utilization deserves additional research.     

An Elder Care Training Needs Assessment Among Employee Assistance Program Staff

A mail survey of 95 EAP staff members explored the issue of elder care (employee informal care and company formal policy) and collected data pertinent to training needs, competence to handle employed caregiver problems/questions, and company commitment. Major findings were: (1) EAP staff members estimated that one in five employees currently provides care for an older dependent; (2) most (74.5%) staff have not received any training relevant to elder care; (3) self-assessed competence to handle elder care problems was low for 14 of 17 problem-solving domains constituting the Elder Care Competence Index (ECCI), less than half of the respondents felt competent; (4) the few (13.8%) EAP staff members with extensive (2 or more sessions) elder care-specific training experience achieved ECCI scores nearly double those of other workers, p < .01; (5) most (78.8%) companies have not dealt with the issue in any formal way and only 7.6% of their EAP staff believe this inaction to be appropriate; and (6) company commitment (i.e., formal policy- issue studied, offered programs/services or benefits) is directly related to EAP training (p < .01) and consequently to staff competence ( < .05). The implications for training, policy, and future research are discussed.