Workplace Outcome Suite (WOS) Annual Report 2020: Part 1 - Decade of Data on EAP Counseling Reveals Prominence of Presenteeism.

Abstract

Report 1 of 2. The Workplace Outcome Suite (WOS) industry profile is made up of data contributed by multiple providers worldwide since year 2010. This white paper is the forth in an annual series of reports on the Workplace Outcome Suite that first started in 2016. This study looks at six outcomes from the WOS: (1) Work Presenteeism, (2) Work Absenteeism, (3) Workplace Distress, (4) Work Engagement, (5) Life Satisfaction, and (6) a new measure that combines the results of the absenteeism and presenteeism data converted into hours of Lost Productive Time (LPT) at work. This report features 35,693 employees with self-reported data collected at before and after a counseling intervention provided by an employee assistance program (EAP). The data was collected over a period of 10 years, between 2010 and 2019. A total of 38 different sources provided valid data on all five WOS measures, with 20 EAP vendors, 17 employer-based programs and one industry group of external vendors in the United States. Although 26 different countries are represented, 95% of the total cases are from only four countries with almost three-fourths of the total from just one country - the United States (72%). China (22%) and New Zealand (3%) both had more than a 1,000 cases, with the remaining 3% of cases spread across 23 other countries (from two vendors and two large multi-national corporations). Within the United States, all five regions of the country were represented and profiled. Main findings: Brief counseling from EAPs was associated with statistically significant improvements on all five WOS outcomes. Large size statistical effects were found for improvement on a composite measure of all five outcomes and for the specific outcomes of work presenteeism and life satisfaction. A medium size statistical effect was found for reducing work absenteeism. Small size statistical effects were found for the more organizationally-influenced WOS outcomes of work engagement and workplace distress. Work presenteeism is the outcome that most defines the employee who uses an EAP, both in terms of the initial impact (work deficit) when distressed before use and also the improvement after counseling. When absenteeism and presenteeism were converted into hours of lost work productivity, the average employee case had 63 hours of unproductive time when in distress before EAP use. Yet, at the follow- up after counseling, this was reduced by 43% to 36 hours. Other research showed the typical worker is unproductive for 27 hours per month. Thus, the EAP user had more than double the amount of lost productive time when first seeking assistance compared to the average employee. However, after counseling had ended, 75% of this initially very high level of lost productivity at work had been restored. The effectiveness of EAP counseling is robust across almost all of the contexts with data to test. The extent of improvement from before to after counseling on WOS measures was generally consistent across client age and sex, across the clinical factors of the type of issue, the number of clinical sessions used, the total duration of the time period of the treatment period, and the source of referral into the EAP, and across different employer conditions of industry and whether the EAP was provided by an external vendor, internal staff, or a hybrid model.