Background
According to Watson Wyatt, factors such as mental health conditions, sleep problems, stigma, and substance use and abuse affect business performance by reducing productivity and increasing both planned and unplanned absences….[The report] suggests that fully-integrated organizational responses to health and productivity challenges will increase revenue, market value, and shareholder returns.
The National Business Group on Health,
An Employer’s Guide to Employee Assistance Programs
EAPs are vehicles that benefit both employees and employers; there is a mutual interest of both groups to promote employee well-being. What we need now is a better, more scientific understanding of the impact and effects of EAP on individual workers and organizational functioning.
Paul M. Roman, PhD
Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology
University of Georgia
What scientific findings underlie the above statements? How do employee assistance services affect these conditions that are costly for employers, employees and their families? What role do employee assistance services play in an “integrated organizational response?” What constitutes EAP in the 21st century? What EAP practices support the goal of positive outcomes for both the employer and employee? What are the costs and benefits of EAP that every employer should consider? How effective are alternative models of delivering EAP?
These fundamental questions underlay the founding in 2007 of the Employee Assistance Research Foundation with a $1 million matching grant donation by the Tisone Family Trust. The Foundation seeks to influence and inspire with evidence the power of EAPs to transform individual lives and maximize employees’ contributions to organizational success through research of the best scientific quality disseminated to purveyors, practitioners, and purchasers of EAPs.
Our Vision and Research Priorities
The Foundation will be guided by the following principles in its quest to fulfill this vision:
- Maintain research integrity and independence.
- Be a catalyst.
- Collaborate with existing employee assistance professionals, associations, and foundations.
There are two themes for the research priorities of the Foundation:
1. Understanding the EAP Field: What Is the Current State of the Art?
2. The Effectiveness of EA Services: How Well Do They Work?
Grant Requests We Will Fund
Funding will go towards three areas:
- research grants that will answer the questions in the two themes;
- dissemination grants to translate research results into applied tools, articles, and other publishable forms that will be accessible and useful to purveyors of services, the business community, unions, and the larger public; and
- presentations of research findings at meetings within the EA field and related fields.