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Why an Employee Assistance Programme Is Not a Mental Health Strategy

28 September 2026 · By Peter Kelly

Autumn is budget season for many employers. Somewhere on the spreadsheet sits a renewal line for the employee assistance programme (EAP), and next to it, too often, a tick in the box marked mental health.

Let me be clear from the start. An employee assistance programme is worth having. Confidential, independent support at the moment someone is struggling can make a real difference. My concern is not with EAPs. It is with what organisations ask them to do.

An EAP supports people once they are already under pressure. It does not change the work that put them there. When it becomes the main answer to work-related stress, an organisation is funding the ambulance and ignoring the hazard.

What an EAP does well

A good EAP gives people somewhere to turn that is outside their line management chain. It can help with problems that start at home as well as at work. For some employees, it may be the first place they talk about how they feel.

That kind of support has a clear place in the evidence. WHO, the United Nations agency for health, describes action on mental health at work in terms of preventing work-related mental health conditions, protecting and promoting mental health, supporting workers with mental health conditions, and creating an enabling environment for change. Support is one of those areas. It is not the first.

Prevention comes first, and an EAP is not prevention

WHO is direct about what prevention means. It is about managing psychosocial risks, and WHO recommends that employers do this through organisational interventions that directly target working conditions and environments. These are interventions that assess, then mitigate, modify or remove workplace risks to mental health.

ISO 45003, the global standard for psychological health and safety at work, takes the same line. When it was published in 2021, the ISO committee responsible described it as prioritising a risk-based approach that tackles the root causes of psychological ill health rather than only addressing the negative impacts of psychosocial risk.

The legal position in Great Britain points the same way. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) states that employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a stress risk assessment and acting on it. Its Management Standards focus on the underlying causes: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.

An EAP cannot reduce a workload. It cannot clarify a role, fix a rota, or change how a manager behaves. It sees the effect, one person at a time, and only when that person chooses to call.

What the data says about where employers put their effort

The latest Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Health and wellbeing at work survey, published in September 2025 and based on responses from 1,101 organisations, shows the imbalance clearly.

Among organisations taking steps to identify and reduce stress, 52 per cent use an EAP. Only 38 per cent use risk assessments or stress audits, 28 per cent make changes in work organisation such as adapting job roles, and 20 per cent use the HSE Management Standards. EAPs are offered to all employees in 67 per cent of organisations.

Yet the same survey found heavy workloads were the top cause of stress-related absence, cited by 41 per cent of organisations reporting it. HSE’s own statistics also identify workload as the main cause of work-related stress, depression or anxiety, which affected 964,000 workers in 2024/25 and led to 22.1 million working days lost. Over a third of CIPD respondents (37 per cent) said their organisation is much more reactive than proactive, and only half of organisations think their efforts to manage stress are effective.

Put simply, the most common tool is aimed at the symptoms of the most common cause.

There is a wider lesson in the research on individual-level interventions. A UK study of 46,336 workers in 233 organisations, published in the Industrial Relations Journal in 2024, found that people who took part in interventions such as resilience training, mindfulness and wellbeing apps appeared no better off on measures of wellbeing than those who did not. It was a cross-sectional study, so it cannot prove cause, but it adds weight to the case for changing the work, not just supporting the worker.

How to make your EAP part of a real strategy

Keep your EAP. Just put it in the right place. Here are five ways to do that.

  1. Start with the risk assessment, not the contract. Identify your main psychosocial hazards and the controls that will change the work. Then decide what role support services play alongside those controls.
  2. Use the anonymised data. Ask your provider for regular management information on the types of issue raised and trends over time, reported in a way that protects confidentiality. A rise in work-related contacts from one part of the business is a signal to look at the work there.
  3. Be clear with managers about what the EAP is for. A referral is not a substitute for a supportive conversation, a reasonable adjustment or a look at workload. Managers should see it as one option, not the end of their responsibility.
  4. Connect it to everything else. Make sure the EAP, occupational health, human resources and health and safety teams know how people move between them, especially during absence and return to work.
  5. Measure outcomes, not just usage. Usage figures tell you how many people called. Your risk assessment, absence patterns and staff survey results tell you whether the hazards are reducing.

A workplace mental health strategy has prevention at its centre, with protection and support built around it. The EAP belongs in that picture. It just cannot be the picture. If you are reviewing your wellbeing spend this autumn, our strategic advisory work can help you test whether your plan tackles causes as well as consequences.

Frequently asked questions

Does having an employee assistance programme meet our legal duties on stress?

Not on its own. HSE states that employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it. An EAP can form part of the support you provide, but it does not identify the hazards in your work or reduce them. The Management Standards approach is designed to help employers find and tackle the underlying causes, such as excessive demands, low control, poor support, conflict, unclear roles and badly managed change. Support services work best alongside those controls.

How do we know if our EAP is working?

Look beyond the usage rate. Ask your provider what people are contacting the service about, how that is changing over time, and whether work-related issues cluster in particular areas, while protecting individual confidentiality. Compare that information with your stress risk assessment, absence data and staff survey results. If the same work pressures keep appearing, the EAP is doing its job of catching people, but your organisation has not yet done its job of removing the cause.

Sources

About the author

Peter J Kelly is an occupational psychologist and the founder of Being Real. He spent more than twenty years at the Health and Safety Executive shaping national policy on workplace mental health, sat on the panel that drafted ISO 45003, and was expert convenor for BS 30480. Being Real supports organisations with ISO 45003 gap analysis and certification, BS 30480 implementation, psychosocial risk assessment, strategic advisory and training.

If you or a colleague are struggling, Samaritans are free, confidential and open 24/7 on 116 123.

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