Employees are people. Sounds obvious right? But even the best employers can forget this sometimes.

Employees are people first and, besides working for your company, they play other important roles too – like being a spouse, parent, sibling and friend. Each person in your business has a life outside the workplace, and it’s not uncommon for issues from their personal lives to creep into their working hours.

You might be thinking – it’s all good, I’ve got this covered, Gurus. When someone in your business has a sick child, a relationship breakdown, or feels a bit stressed, you just give them a few days off, right? Wrong. Remember again – employees are people.

Sure, we all have bad days, but there are times when saying ‘he/she has just had a bad day’ doesn’t cut it. As an employer you need to recognise there will be times when an employee is in significant personal crisis. And, while genuine understanding and support from you is vital, making
professional support services available is also extremely important in helping someone to weather the storm.

A sound Employee Assistance Program (EAP) will be designed to enhance the general wellbeing of all employees. The aim is to provide preventive and proactive interventions for the early detection, identification and resolution of problems that are impacting on your people. Sounds like a nice thing to have – but why should your businesses pay for something like this?

Simple really. Investing in health and wellbeing is likely to be the most significant factor that will influence the quality of work, productivity, attendance and retention of your staff. Studies have shown that EAPs deliver enormous benefits to businesses including reduced turnover and absenteeism, and higher employee productivity. An effective EAP also reduces your business’s exposure
to risk, particularly when it comes to costly Work Cover claims.

If you’re an SME you might think it all sounds too hard, too big or too expensive for your business. And, based on many EAP services in the market you might be forgiven for thinking ‘my employees wouldn’t be interested in reaching out to an impersonal call centre’ or ‘these one-size-fits-all packages don’t suit my business.’ That’s almost fair enough. But doing nothing is unfair on your employees – as well as being risky business.

At HR Gurus, we’ve been working on a range of tailored, flexible and most importantly – usable – EAP services for SMEs, including individual counselling, critical incident response, a manager hotline and training and development, just to name a few. And, we are a little different because:

• They are not bundled together in one huge package.
• They won’t cost you big bucks.
• We won’t sell you what you don’t need.  But we will listen and tailor an EAP to fit your business.
• You don’t have to get locked into a contract, paying for services that never get used. We offer a flexible ‘fee for service’ model where you know all costs up front and pay on an ‘as needs’ basis.
• You will be showing your people that you value their wellbeing and they will thank you by working hard, sticking around and generally just loving their job!

By now you probably have some questions, or might be starting to wonder how an EAP program would fit within your business? Well head on over to our Contact Us page and let’s start the conversation. We would love to chat with you about how an EAP can help you help your people.