By Carolyn Apostolou | Workplace Wellbeing Specialist
Welcome back to Room to Lead, a monthly newsletter on leading high-performing teams sustainably, without running yourself or your people into the ground.
We are now at almost 1000 subscribers and I am so grateful for every one of you who reads, shares and replies. This month I want to tackle something that comes up in almost every conversation I have with HR leaders and executives and that rarely gets said out loud.
Let’s get into it.
There is a conversation I have with organisations more often than any other. It usually starts the same way.
I’m sitting across from an HR leader or a senior executive; we’re talking about burnout, disengagement or rising absenteeism and somewhere in the first ten minutes, they lean back slightly and say:
“We already have an EAP.”
It is said the way people say they’ve already taken their vitamins. A kind of moral tick. The box has been checked. The base has been covered. And I understand why. An Employee Assistance Program is a visible, measurable investment in employee wellbeing. The service exists. The number is on the intranet. Legally and culturally, it signals that the organisation cares. But here is what the data says…and it is worth sitting with.
The Utilisation Problem Nobody Talks About
Despite 80% of Australia’s top 500 companies offering EAPs to their employees, average utilisation rates remain stubbornly low, sitting at around 5% across Australia, the UK and the US. Five percent. Which means that for every 100 people in your organisation, roughly 95 of them are not using the one wellbeing resource you have in place.
In some organisations, take-up sits as low as 3% and more than a quarter of employees don’t even know the EAP exists. Let that land for a moment.
You are paying for a service that the vast majority of your workforce will never use, and a significant portion has never heard of.
That is not a criticism of EAPs. They serve a very important function, and I will come back to that. But it is a significant problem when an EAP is the primary or only wellbeing resource an organisation offers because it means that for 95 out of every 100 employees, the answer to “what support do we have?” is effectively nothing.
Why People Don’t Use Them
The low utilisation rates are not a mystery. The three key factors causing low uptake are that EAPs are not built into the culture, there is a lack of awareness of what support is available, and persistent stigma and discrimination towards staff who experience mental health challenges.
To put it simply, people don’t use EAPs because they don’t know about them, they don’t trust them, or they don’t feel safe being seen to need them.
That last point is the most important one for leaders to hear.
An EAP operates on the assumption that an employee will voluntarily identify themselves as struggling, reach out to an external service, and trust that doing so won’t affect how they are perceived or managed. In most workplaces, even well-intentioned ones, that is a significant ask.
The cultures where people are most likely to need mental health support are often the same cultures where it is least safe to seek it. Which means the employees who most need the EAP are frequently the last ones to call it.
What an EAP Actually Is
I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument against EAPs. It is an argument for understanding what they are and what they are not.
An EAP is a reactive, crisis-adjacent service. It is designed to support people who are already struggling, to provide counselling, referrals and crisis intervention for employees who have reached a point where they need external help.
That is valuable. There are people in your organisation right now for whom an EAP call will make a meaningful difference. The service matters. But reactive support, by definition, arrives after the damage has been done. After the stress has become chronic. After the burnout has set in. After the high performer has quietly decided they’re done.
Safe Work Australia puts the median time lost from a mental health workers’ compensation claim at 35.7 working weeks, compared with 7.4 weeks for all other serious claims. Almost five times longer.
By the time someone’s mental health becomes a compensation claim, the cost to that person and to the organisation is already enormous. An EAP catches some of those people on the way down. It does not stop them from falling.
The Difference Between a Safety Net and a Strategy
Here is the distinction I use with every organisation I work with.
A safety net catches people when they fall. A strategy stops them from falling in the first place. An EAP is a safety net. It is what you have at the bottom of the cliff. It is not the fence at the top.
A real wellbeing strategy lives upstream, in the conditions that determine whether people thrive or deteriorate. And those conditions are not owned by the team running the wellbeing calendar. They are owned by leaders.
Workload is set by leaders. Meeting culture is set by leaders. Whether it is safe to say you’re struggling is set by leaders, mostly by what they model rather than what they say in town halls.
The organisations I work with that really move the needle on wellbeing are not the ones with the most generous EAP packages. They are the ones where leadership has made a deliberate, visible decision to treat wellbeing as a performance and leadership discipline, not an HR initiative that runs in the background.
That looks like:
- Leaders who talk openly about energy, limits and recovery. Not in a performative way. In the natural, matter-of-fact way that says “this is normal here.”
- Managers who are trained to have real conversations. Not “how are you?” and then “great, let’s talk about the quarterly numbers.” Real conversations, the kind that create space for honest answers and know what to do with them.
- Workloads that are designed rather than inherited. Most teams are operating under workloads that were set in a different era, under different circumstances, and have never been meaningfully reviewed. The default is accumulation. The discipline is design.
- Psychological safety that is built rather than assumed. Most leaders believe their teams feel safe to speak up. Most teams don’t. The gap between those two realities is where burnout, disengagement and quiet exits live.
What to Do With This
If you are reading this as an HR leader or executive, I am not suggesting you remove your EAP. Please don’t. I am suggesting you stop treating it as a strategy.
Here are three questions worth asking your organisation right now:
- What is our EAP utilisation rate and what does that tell us? If it’s below 5%, that is not necessarily a reflection of a healthy workforce. It may be a reflection of a culture where people don’t feel safe reaching out. Understanding which one it is matters enormously.
- What are we doing upstream of the EAP? What conditions are we actively managing to reduce the likelihood that someone needs crisis support in the first place? If the honest answer is “not much,” that is the gap worth addressing.
- Who owns wellbeing in this organisation? If the answer is “HR” or “the wellbeing team,” that is the problem. Wellbeing needs to be owned at the leadership level because the factors that most determine whether a workforce thrives or deteriorates are leadership factors, not HR factors.
A Final Thought
I have had the “we already have an EAP” conversation enough times to know that it is almost never said defensively. It is said by people who actually really care about their teams and who are doing the best they can with the tools they have.
My intention is not to make anyone feel they have gotten it wrong. It is to open up the conversation about what “getting it right” could look like because the gap between a safety net and a strategy is where an enormous amount of preventable suffering, avoidable cost and unnecessary turnover currently lives.
Your people deserve more than a number on the intranet and your organisation is capable of building something that actually works.
About the Author
Carolyn Apostolou is a multi-international award-winning Workplace Wellbeing Specialist based in Melbourne, Australia. She works with organisations to prevent burnout, protect leadership performance and build sustainable workplace cultures through programs, coaching, keynote speaking and retreats.
To contact Carolyn Apostolou, click here.