Employee assistance professionals are continually confronted with the behaviours of people and procedures that challenge, excite, or demoralise. Within the context of productivity oriented organizations, culture, personal interactions, interpersonal caring, and spiritual values can be diminished or altogether lost. This article explores where spirituality fits into the contemporary workplace, its role in respect to the workplace challenges we encounter, and its potential in helping us deal with the suffering created by dysfunctional and demoralising work environments.

Employee Assistance Programs continue to evolve and broaden the scope of programming provided to employees. Many EAPs now claim that wellness programming is a core component. However, the definition of wellness is often limited to only one or two dimensions of the concept. As well, EAPs generally have yet to fully examine the relationship between wellness and the nature of work. This article’s premise is that EAPs should be working towards not only improving worker wellness but also workplace wellness.

The workplace is a salient venue through which to address personal difficulties and to assist family functioning directly. Intervention in the workplace also assists the community by reducing the number and severity of problems experienced by families. Yet, what is the responsibility of social work to the workplace? Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in North America, an antagonistic relationship has existed between labour and management, with social workers acting as intermediaries. Responsibilities of occupational social workers have ranged from ensuring that young single women were living in virtuous Christian environments, to bringing widespread use of critical incident stress debriefing to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) in the 1980s. These initiatives by social workers and related counselling professionals supplanted self-helpers in the workplace who had become active through groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous asearly as the 1940s.

The worksite is an important setting which impacts on the social, mental and physical well-being of the worker. A healthy workplace environment can induce many positive changes such as, a healthier workforce, increased morale, reduced absenteeism and, in turn, increased productivity. Conversely, an unhealthy and hazardous workplace can increase mortality and morbidity, lower the worker's quality of life, escalate health care costs.