Transforming Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP)

Challenge 1: Low take-up rate

Between 30% to 50% of Malaysian employees are wrestling with elevated levels of Depression, Anxiety and Stress;

Yet, less than 4% of employees are utilizing EAP services in companies that provide this support.

There’s clearly a disconnect: many employees are not willing to reach out to seek help when they feel overwhelmed, partly from the stigma of being seen to require mental health support, and partly lack of awareness for what they are experiencing or that the support is available.

The prevalence of mental health problems in Malaysia is significant and growing, as it is elsewhere in the world. Naluri has screened over 5,000 employees and the profile of severity levels of depression, anxiety, and stress have been very consistent: 60% are wrestling with at least one elevated level, and 25% are wrestling with a severe level in at least one dimension.

This is consistent with the Ministry of Health’s 2015 national survey which showed that 29% of Malaysians are dealing with mental health problems, with a higher rate of 40% in Urban Kuala Lumpur. AIA’s Healthiest Workplace Summit survey in 2019 also echoes this, showing 51% of Malaysian employees are dealing with work-related stress.

The bottom-line impact is significant. On average, employee health significantly undermines productivity with 8 days of absenteeism and 65 days of presenteeism a year (where an employee shows up to work but is not productive).

Challenge 2: One-off transactional sessions don’t lead to measurable improvements

For the few who use traditional EAP services that include a telephone hotline or booking a face-to-face therapy session, the average number of sessions is only two times. While this may help to stave off crisis-level incidents like suicide ideation, it will rarely lead to lasting improvements unless the employee can receive structured interventions over a longer period of 12-16 weeks to address root causes of the depression, anxiety or stress. We need to re-think EAP services away from these transactional “first-aid” services.

Challenge 3: mental health is addressed separately from physical health and employee engagement

Traditional EAP service providers tend to only offer mental health support and lack an integrated approach that addresses physical health risks like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia. Yes, we see a clear correlation. To effectively improve mental health, employees need to be guided on improving nutrition, having regular exercise and managing their chronic illnesses. This requires a multi-disciplinary coordinated approach, rather than just only counselling by a mental healthcare professional.

At Naluri, we’re transforming this traditional Employee Assistance Program (EAP) model by using digital tools to proactively screen employees with potential risk factors, build on-going engagement with a team of professional multi-disciplinary coaches using instant messaging, and then using machine learning to help detect potential dips in emotion and reach out to the employees proactively. At the core, we have a team of qualified professional health experts to help improve employee well-being. Digital technology allows these professional services to be scaled much more conveniently, more affordably, and also help to reduce the stigma barriers for getting mental health support.

By starting with an ‘achieving our healthiest and best selves’ campaign, we’re able to generate interest among many employees to sign up for a health screening that combines physical health and a mental health assessment. This allows us to profile and share aggregated results to employers and invite those with elevated risks to enroll in a 3-6-month digital coaching program. Typically, employees focus the first month of coaching on less sensitive health topics like weight management, exercise and workforce stress. As a relationship is built, they begin to open up to their personally assigned psychologist about deep-seated fears and anxieties that are buried deep within them. The on-going chat allows us to profile emotional sentiment, which can trigger the need for our psychologists to reach out proactively, when we see significant dips.

In this example, an employee’s chat indicated a major dip in her emotion, that triggered our psychologist to reach out to her, and she was willing to open up because of the relationship built. She had expressed suicide ideation. We then moved the engagement to a more intensive therapy model with one-on-one sessions either through video conferencing or face-to-face. Eventually, the employee stabilized her emotional levels.

By combining professional psychological support with digital tools, we can engage the employee more frequently and conveniently and help guide them to achieve clinically-significant improvements in their condition.

With our integrated and holistic health approach that combines mental health and physical health, led by a behavioural psychologist as a health coach, we are able to deliver quantifiable improvements that are clinically-significant. Traditional EAPs only measure take-up rate, but do not link to quantifiable improvements that can be linked to productivity gains, reduction in medical claims and sick leave, and ultimately, provide a basis for better managing health insurance premiums.

To explore further how Naluri can help your organisation be a leader in employee mental health and wellness, please reach out to us here or at [email protected]