The Workplace Effects of EAP –
Pooled Results for over 2,800 clients
by Drs. David Sharar and Richard Lennox

At the conceptual core of EAP is an awareness of the impact of an employee’s unresolved personal problems on work effectiveness. Despite this core dimension, measures of the effectiveness of an EAP have NOT routinely or credibly captured whether providers achieve results that are relevant to workplace effectiveness, and thus meaningful to an employer – until now!

The Workplace Outcome Suite (WOS) was specifically designed for EAPs by the Division of Commercial Science at Chestnut Global Partners (CGP).

The tool is short (25 total items with five scales), psychometrically tested and validated, workplace focused, easy to administer, and FREE with the signing of a License Agreement. 

The WOS contains five-item measures of five scales that are popular and lie at the heart of understanding EAP effectiveness: absenteeism, presenteeism, work engagement, life satisfaction, and workplace distress. About 400 different EAPs have signed License Agreements to use the WOS.

Below are results for 2,878 actual EAP employee clients from 15 different EAP vendors using the WOS.  These vendors submitted their "de-identified" (identify removed) data to CGP for analysis and allowed us to “pool” the results.

EAP clients were pretested with the WOS before introducing EAP intervention and then post-tested after the intervention, usually 60-90 days later.

The ninety day follow-up post-test allows EAP intervention to run its course and see if the EAP intervention had a sustained impact.

The results support the premise that EAP intervention produces a positive workplace impact across all five measures.

Absenteeism in particular dropped about 6 hours per-employee (difference between hours missed due to a personal problem on pre/post measure over 30 day time frame).

This measure can be monetized by calculating an average hourly rate for benefits and wages of ($40.00) x (6 hours saved) x 2,878 EAP cases = $690,720.00 in savings as an example.

The absenteeism savings alone may cover or exceed the entire cost of a reasonable quality EAP service.

For more information, please contact Drs. David Sharar (dsharar@chestnut.org) or Richard Lennox (rlennox@chestnut.org). The WOS may be viewed by clicking on this link. ( http://bit.ly/17fVRhV ).