Setting a two-year plan: wanting to create immediate value, Dow Chemical developed a two-year plan with specific goals and objectives to heighten awareness of its EAP and maximize its contribution to workforce success and performance.

To exert maximum influence within an organization, an employee assistance program must be cross-functional with other business units and take the lead in partnering with departments and divisions within the organization. EAPs that "silo" themselves will exert little influence and add little or no value to the organizational client's human capital. EA professionals, meanwhile, must take financial ownership of their programs by developing and managing their own budgets.

The Dow Chemical Company has a long history of EAP involvement, initiating an alcohol assistance program more than 40 years ago for its Operations Division in Michigan. During the 1970s and 1980s, Dow began to offer EAP services at all its U.S. sites and adopted the "broad brush" approach to programming that was becoming popular at the time. In the late 1990s, Dow followed the prevailing trend of outsourcing its employee assistance services and began expanding its EAP to cover sites outside the United States.

In February 2001, Dow Chemical merged with Union Carbide, and the two firms' EAP services were consolidated. In an effort to remove the stigma of EAPs as counseling services for the alcoholic, chronically ill employee or the worker about to lose his/her job, Dow positioned the new EAP within the broader context of its Employee Counseling Services (ECS). ECS is accessible to all employees and family members and incorporates other types of counseling services. For example, ECS piloted a career-counseling program at one U.S. site to enhance Dow's career development plan. The program offered telephone-based or face-to-face coaching and allowed employees to work independently with a career counselor on their career plans within Dow.

ECS is located within Dow's Human Resources function, which is divided into three basic divisions: the Strategic Center, the Resource Center, and Business Partners. Dow made a tactical decision to align ECS with the Strategic Center to strengthen accountability and leverage processes and technologies that contribute to the overall Human Resources mission of "Enabling Business Success Through People." The Strategic Center encompasses Human Resource Development and Workforce Planning, which includes staffing, individual development and organizational effectiveness, and corporate initiatives.

TWO-YEAR PLAN

When I joined Dow in April 2001, 1 sat down with the ECS staff and asked, "How can we make ourselves more valuable to the corporation?" We devised a two-year plan to strategically position and promote Employee Counseling Services to encourage individual success and enhance job performance. Under the banner of our new motto, "The right service the first time," we set a direction with specific goals and objectives to ensure that our vision became a reality

The key steps in the plan were as follows:

1. Create accountability at the program level for ECS. We established a specific cost center account to coordinate global expenditures for all ECS program development and implementation. This was an opportunity for ECS to establish a viable identity and accountability within the Human Resources structure.

2. Develop and implement vendor standards, performance expectations, and measurements. Vendor standards and measures were incorporated into new service agreements to ensure that Dow receives consistent, high-quality service delivery with consideration to local legal and cultural issues.

3. Enhance the visibility of Employee Counseling Services. The development of an internal ECS Web page and new marketing brochures became our focus during 2002. We launched a global home page with country-specific Finks (and corresponding languages) for employees to access. Multiple opportunities are also available for employees to read or visit approved sites, such as confidential, self-directed mental health screening tools.

4. Partner with other functions within the organization to leverage the EAP's expertise. One of the most effective ways to heighten the visibility of an EAP and increase its influence and value is to partner with other functions within the organization.

For example, I developed a strong relationship with our Health Services organization by asking, "How can we integrate our programs and work together to provide seamless service delivery to our employees?" We developed guidelines and procedures for a stress management tool that was being introduced by Health Services; this process educated the Health Service teams about the EAP and facilitated cross-referrals with EAP staff. We also incorporated an EAP representative into the consultation team for addressing work stress issues and linked our Web page with the Health Services Web page to create a "one-stop-shopping" experience for overall health issues.

We also partnered with Relocation to assist a large expatriate population in Malaysia that was returning to the United States about a year after the merger announcement. These expatriates were primarily Union Carbide employees with little previous exposure to Dow Chemical. Research has shown that it can take up to 18 months to adjust and reintegrate after an international assignment, and that adjustment will raise both personal and professional issues.

ECS and Relocation developed a repatriation assistance program for this group. We implemented employee assistance services, providing educational information as well as confidential telephonic consultation and debriefing with a repatriation counselor. Dow provided information to employees, family members, and managers and promoted human resources programs that hadn't been available in Malaysia.

5. Create a global ECS team to reinforce the ECS vision to Dow leaders in other countries. Human Resources leaders came together to elevate our focus and long-term objectives. A global employee counseling team representing Asia and the Pacific Rim, Europe, Latin America, South Africa, and the United States was created with the goal of reinforcing the vision to strategically position and promote Employee Counseling Services. Our Asia/Pacific medical director joined the team as a consulting member, as he has a strong commitment to developing and promoting EAPs throughout Asia.

REVITALIZING THE EAP

These are examples of processes that contributed to heightening the visibility and influence of the EAP within Dow. The timing was right to capitalize on Dow's global technology to move our initiative forward. I thought this two-year plan could revitalize Employee Counseling and put it on the path toward a long-term strategic direction.

Today, Dow has EAP services in place for more than 30,000 employees. The global utilization rate in 2002 was 5.82 percent, with a program high of 16.82 percent in Latin America (where employees have experienced severe financial instability). Formalizing a global reporting process represented a significant piece of our goal of driving consistent, high-quality service deliver.

Linda Sutton is global leader of employee counseling for Dow Chemical The author wishes to thank Beth Steinberg-Hudnall, U.S. EAP Operations Specialist at Dow, for helping with this article.