As a HR professional, wellbeing lead, or a business leader, I want you to take a quick look at your last wellbeing budget review.
Somewhere in that spreadsheet is a line for your Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), which you’re likely paying anywhere between £5 and £15 per person for. On paper, it looks like a robust safety net for your thousands of colleagues. But then you look at the engagement numbers…
For most large organisations, usage rates sit stubbornly in the low single digits. We’ve seen this time and again in our consultancy work. It’s a classic case of paying for a high-performance engine and using it as a door stop.
The problem isn't that your people don't value wellbeing, or that the EAP isn’t serving an important need. The problem is that we’ve all collectively branded the EAP as the "break glass in case of emergency" button.
When we only talk about the EAP in the context of severe mental health challenges or crisis intervention, we unintentionally build a wall of stigma around it. Colleagues think, "I’m not in a crisis, so that’s not for me".
Meanwhile, the "silent operating system" of your business continues to run on stress, burnout, and empty promises.
We’re long overdue a change here. It’s time to stop treating the EAP as a reactive intervention and start selling it to our people as a proactive strategy for a better life. Modern EAPs are incredibly sophisticated, but they suffer from a massive awareness gap.
Many of these programmes come bundled with secondary benefits that your employees are actually desperate for, too. We’re looking at stuff like legal advice for a first-time home buyer, financial coaching to navigate the cost-of-living crisis, or help finding eldercare.
These aren't just nice-to-haves. They’re the foundations of a joyful workplace culture where people feel seen as whole humans, not just cogs in a machine. When we help a colleague solve a nagging financial concern or find a therapist before they reach burnout, we aren’t just "fixing the worker", we’re improving the work itself.
To borrow the tagline from my friends at Tailored Thinking; “make work better to make better work”.
How do we actually turn this undervalued resource into a competitive advantage? We use the Me, We, and Us model (of course, you know me by now!) to make sure we’re covering all bases.
Individual team members need to know that the EAP is a resource for their "everyday" self. It should be the first place they go for online information and advice, or to find a discount on a gym membership to help them stay active.
By using the service for small, positive actions, we build the social muscle required to reach out for bigger things when life gets heavy.
Managers are the front line of workplace wellbeing. They don't need to be therapists, and they certainly shouldn't try to be. However, they do need the confidence to talk about wellbeing with their direct reports and point them to the right proactive or reactive service.
When managers use tools like the Conversation Canvas to guide these discussions, the EAP stops being a mystery and starts being a meaningful intervention.
Organisations need to stop "wellbeing washing" by bringing in yet another app whilst keeping workloads at unsustainable levels.
True cultural change happens when leadership explicitly models using wellbeing resources. If the CEO mentions they used the EAP to find childcare support, it grants everyone else permission to do the same.
The most frustrating thing about the current wellbeing landscape is the pressure on HR leads like you to justify more investment when you aren't seeing a return on what you've already invested.
I’m here to tell you that your wellbeing proposition doesn’t need a bigger budget to make a bigger impact. Not yet, anyway. You just need more people involved in the services you’ve already paid for.
By centralising your services on a single, easy-to-navigate page (or spreadsheet) and using a multichannel approach to tell your employees about them, you can drastically increase engagement. It's about moving from "what we don't have" to "making the most of what we already have".
Today is the day to create a culture where people thrive and performance follows. You’ve already made the investment; now it’s time to realise the value.
At Joy Junction, we specialise in helping organisations like yours surface the hidden value in their existing wellbeing offers without the need to increase budgets.
We don't do copy-paste solutions. Instead, we work with senior leaders and HR teams to co-create strategies that make wellbeing a true part of your organisation’s DNA.
