EAP

An Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provides confidential counseling, referral, and support services — covering mental health, substance abuse, financial stress, legal concerns, and relationship issues — at no cost to employees, typically funded entirely by the employer. The low utilization rate of most EAPs (2 to 5 percent of eligible employees in any given year) is the program's central effectiveness challenge: services that employees do not access produce no wellbeing benefit regardless of their quality. Low utilization stems primarily from stigma, lack of awareness, and uncertainty about confidentiality — organizations that actively destigmatize help-seeking through leader modeling, communication about what confidentiality means in practice, and multiple access points (phone, online, in-person) see utilization rates 3 to 5x higher than passive availability alone produces.