Qualified Optimism: EAP Prospects for the 1990s

Abstract

The Employee Assistance Programme and Work in Organizations TodayThe acronym EAP (employee assistance programme) has been part of the lexicography of human resources managers in Britain for a decade now -and not only those who espouse the softer or more developmental humanist philosophies of HRM. Increasingly EAPs are also becoming part of the vocabulary and the discourse of hard-headed managers and informed directors in organizations of all types, particularly those whose distaste for the excesses of meanness and leanness leads them to monitor carefully the effects of the demands for performance on the part of employees at all levels. For EAPs are seen by managers as capable of playing a growing role in keeping organizations operating at a high level of efficiency, quality and competitiveness. What is attractive to managers is that EAPs can also demonstrate their cost-effectiveness in individual and corporate terms as a new way of handling the stress of professional, commercial or creative work life, as well as the non-work stresses experienced by employees and imported by them into the job context. Some senior British managers in the past have been wary of EAPs as "yet another North American import", unsuited for the very different business and social cultures of Britain. In Europe, however, national variants are emerging and being accepted, especially in the northern European countries, and a distinctive and flourishing EAP tradition has been created in Britain. The EAP is thus demonstrating its worth in tackling the complex issues of stressed employees, and the problems of coping inside work, outside work, and with the interaction of work and the many other roles which employees have to play.