Helping the wellbeing of your colleagues
If you’re worried about the wellbeing of a fellow colleague or employee; noticing a rise in issues such as poor mental health, illness, stress and burnout, or; if you are a staff member tasked with promoting the wellbeing of your company’s workforce, then enlisting workplace therapy services can help. Staff wellbeing is an even greater concern at the time of writing in light of pandemic health concerns.
The Health and Safety Executive have identifies a rise in workplace anxiety, and therefore, workplace counselling can be vital to the health of an organisational workforce to combat the well documented detrimental impact of poor mental and physical health on employees and the companies they work for. Some of this data reveals that:
Mental health problems in the UK workforce in the last year cost employers £35 billion, equivalent to £1,300 per employee in the UK 1
People who attend work whilst unwell, cost businesses twice as much as sickness and absence as a result of poor mental health 2
At any given time 1 in 5 people will have experienced a mental health problem 3
The Office for National Statistics found that 141.1 million working days were lost because of sickness and injury 4
The costs of reduced productivity at work in the UK is 21.2 billion, with the cost of replacing staff who leave their jobs being £3.1 billion due to mental health 5
48% of the British population are stressed at leased once per week, with one in ten people thinking about leaving their job due to stress 6
15 million days are lost every year due to work related stress, with over 500,000 people feeling ill as a result 7
Why should my company invest in workplace therapies?
Sickness/absence has been a significant issue across private and public sectors for some time. Over the years, the government has undertaken several consultations resulting in varied recommendations to address the issue. Companies not only have a legal responsibility, but also a duty of care to its employees to maintain a safe, supportive and considered work environment.
A brief glance at the evidence set out above would suggest that even from a common-sense viewpoint, it makes sense to ensure adequate support is in place for all employees. However, research evidence by McLeod (2010) also showed that workplace counselling interventions have been found to reduce sickness absence rates in organisations by as much as 50%.The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1990 found that the introduction of a counselling service at the Post Office saved it £102,000 over a six-month period. A 2012 Cambridge University study showed clearly that the effect of time-limited counselling (an average of seven sessions) on distressed clients is positive. UK Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA) study reviewed the outcome of more than 28,000 EAP counselling interventions and found that key finding from the above study is that 70% of the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) clients were demonstrably shown to recover or improve following their counselling intervention. In terms of service, EAPs were shown to offer shorter waiting times for treatment than services available on the NHS, and clients were vastly more likely to see the counselling treatment through to completion.
Another study found that workplace counselling contributed to “significant improvements on most attitude-to-work factors: opportunity for control, skill use, job demand, clarity, feeling valued, interpersonal contact, competence, work spill-over, adequacy of pay and job satisfaction”. To put it another way, counselling leads to happier, more positive and secure employees.
Research evidence is compelling and successfully illustrates cost-effectiveness of workplace counselling as well as its capacity to have a positive impact on company productivity.
References
- Office for National Statistics. Sickness absence in the UK labour Market: 2018.
- McLeod J (2010). “Counselling in the workplace: the facts. A systematic study of the research evidence”.
- Mellor-Clark J, Twigg E, Farrell E, Kinder A (2012). Benchmarking key service quality indicators in UK employee assistance programme counselling: a CORE system data profile. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research Journal; 13.