Organizational Consulting and Formal Management Referral Counseling Services from an Employee Assistance Program: Descriptive Profile of Over 15,000 Clients During 2020-2024 at AllOne Health
; McDaniel, Jason C.
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Abstract
This paper provides an empirical profile of the characteristics of 10,641 users of organizational services and also 5,251 users of formal management referral counseling from a single national employee assistance program (EAP) business in the United States. AllOne Health provided an archival data set from the normal course of business over a 5-year period. The total sample featured over 2,000 different employers who varied in size from under 250 to over 340,000 workers (median about 1,200). Eight major industry types were represented, but the majority of clients were working in the government, manufacturing, healthcare and education sectors. Among the organizational consulting group, about half of all users involved workplace-focused issues (48%; with 14% for training requests, 8% for benefits questions; 10% for organizational development issues; 12% to prepare for a workplace crisis; or 4% respond after a crisis incident) and the other half of users of organizational consulting were to get support for worker-focused issues that managers needed guidance on concerning individual employees (52%; 18% employee work-related; 14% employee substance misuse; 10% employee mental health; or 9% employee personal issues). Among the formal management referral counseling group, only 2% of users were for workplace-focused issues and 98% were to support worker-focused issues for individual employees (53% substance misuse; 26% work- related; 17% mental health; 2% personal issues). The results for correlates of use rates of each service type had mostly non-findings for client age, year, during or after the pandemic period and employer size. Employer industry did have some use differences. Employees with substance abuse issues had a unique profile – both for the organizational consulting and the formal management referral services – of being mostly younger age males who worked for larger size companies in the transportation and manufacturing industries and who used shorter episodes of counseling. Contributions and limitations of the study are discussed. This is the largest study ever done in this field to examine the users of both the organizational services and formal management referrals from EAPs.
