In late 2020, Dr. Dale Masi wrote a letter to the editor that was published in the Journal of Employee Assistance titled “EAP Utilization: EAP Field Doesn’t Do Itself Justice.” In the letter, Dr. Masi brought attention to the EAP field citing a 5% employee utilization in one given year as the goal of EAPs. For example, 50 employees using an EAP in a company with a total of 1,000 employees would have 5% utilization.

Using this method resulted in a great deal of criticism, as seen in two recent articles – the first published in the Wall Street Journal article (Feintzeig, 2020) while the second was an article in the Society for Human Resource Management (Agovino, 2019). Dr. Masi went on to explain how EAPs responded by using various methods to raise the utilization count using their services. These included counting the employees’ family members, employees who used Work/Life services, and even individuals who didn’t show up for counseling. These figures were added into the numerator of employees using programs without changing the denominator of the number of employees. EAPs calculated these as part of their annual utilization count.