Promoting employee resiliency: EA professionals can support safety, accountability, commitment, and community within work organizations and thereby promote employee resiliency.

In the final analysis, business is about growth and profitability. Achieving these results requires productivity, sustainability, and goal alignment, which necessitate the maintenance of material assets and human resources. Maintaining human resources, in turn, requires preserving workers' health and safety. Preserving workers' health and safety means addressing both their physical and mental needs.

Plainly stated, that's the logic chain: recognizing the connection between business growth and profitability on the one end and the physical and mental needs of employees on the other. The key link in that connection is the EAP.

ADDRESSING IMMEDIATE NEEDS

At first blush, an EAP may be seen as a "nice to have" benefit to offer employees, and that it certainly is. The vast majority of people who contact EAPs are self-referrals seeking help for a wide variety of problems that have not yet compromised their job performance of prompted their managers to initiate remedial action. Making such use of an EAP is commendable in that it reveals a sense of self-responsibility for one's health and behavior.

But EAPs would have withered long ago if they were solely a "nice to have" offering. In fact, an EAP, used to full advantage, is a multifaceted tool capable of addressing several key business concerns, including the following:

* Crisis management (responding to incidents involving fatalities and/or hostages)

* Risk management (evaluating the threat of violence)

* Safety management (evaluating psychological fitness for duty and supervising drug-free workplace programs)

* Performance management (intervening in case of deteriorating job performance)

When a fatality occurs, an EAP offers support to affected co-workers and family members. In hostage situations, an EAP often serves as a liaison to spouse(s) and key family members. Should a threat of violence be expressed or exhibited, an EAP becomes a key player in the psychological evaluation process.

If an impairment exists due to a mental health disorder of substance abuse problem, an EAP aids in determining when sufficient treatment has occurred and a return to work is feasible. On a daily basis, an EAP coaches and consults with management in human resources (HR), health, safety, and environment (HSE), and operations in intervening with troubled workers and addressing job performance deficits, to the benefit of employees and employers alike.

ADDRESSING ONGOING NEEDS

As important as the above functions are, they are predominantly reactive--responding to problem events alma@ in motion. Reactive maneuvers, although often necessary, do not create a sustain able solution to workplace safety and health. EA professionals must ask what the key drivers of a durable, resilient workforce are and how an EAP can support them. I submit that the most important drivers are safety, accountability, commitment, and community.

Safety. The most fundamental need of every human being is to feel safe. This feeling hinges on two perceptions, one external and one internal. We need to know that our external environment is sale and that those around us have our best interests in mind, and we constantly appraise our own state of mind to confirm that we are okay It is a natural desire to want to achieve internal equilibrium as well, to feel balanced and "run on all eight cylinders."

Organizations promote sale behavior inside and outside the workplace by providing methods and resources to increase mental health awareness. Personnel from HSE and the EAP collaborate to educate employees on stress management, fatigue awareness, diet, fitness, and substance abuse.

Accountability. While it may come as a surprise to some (although not to most parents), accountability is a health-preserving tactic. People without expectations often gravitate toward less healthy, more risky behaviors. Accountability forms the trellis that supports responsible behavior.

Many EAP cases involve holding employees accountable for making health- and safety-maintaining lifestyle changes. For example, when an employee in a safety-sensitive position presents with a substance abuse problem, EAP staff will guide and support him through well-researched treatment services while simultaneously emphasizing his responsibility to fully maintain treatment commitments and stay drug-free of else jeopardize his employment status.

Commitment. Every day, employees choose whether or not to commit to their work. Individuals and organizations that feel committed have a strong sense of purpose, vision, and values. They feel engaged, involved, and energized. When an organization does not engender commitment, employees feel disenchanted and disengaged and soon begin to disregard health and safety standards. EAPs are often useful as barometers of employee temperament within an organization, as internal consultants in addressing employee welfare, and as spokespersons (through their trainings) of the organization's values.

Community. Human beings have strong needs to affiliate--to be part of something larger than themselves. In contrast with the meteoric rise and inevitable burn-out of the workaholic employee, a connected employee is more durable and resilient and thus more conducive to the development of a sustainable work organization.

EAPs can help promote community through their ongoing encouragement of work/life balance. Frequently, an EAP client presents as stressed by work expectations, overwhelmed by family obligations, and torn by the competition between the two. Left unaddressed, these problems often translate into increased physical illness and lost work time. Re-establishing a balance between work and private life allows for affiliative needs to be met and energies to be refreshed.

In sum, an EAP is a multi-purpose tool--a Swiss Army knife of functions. The savvy employer recognizes this and utilizes the EAP to its full capacity.

A program that functions solely as a nice-to-have fringe benefit offered to employees falls far short of its potential value to the employer at large, to the human resources function in particular, and to employees whose work lives could be improved by a more systemic application of the EAP's skills and abilities. A well-applied EAP can serve both the immediate and ongoing aspects of employee health and resiliency by promoting safety, accountability, commitment, and community In so doing, EAPs advance the larger goals of business sustainability, growth, and profitability.

Jeff Christie is manager of the employee assistance program at Halliburton. He has served as president of the Houston Chapter of EAPA, president of the Employee Assistance Roundtable, and a commissioner on the Employee Assistance Certification Commission.