Aspiria
Empire Life and Aspiria announce a new Employee Assistance Program
Empire Life and Aspiria announce a new Employee Assistance Program
(Kingston, ON – January 26, 2011) – The Empire Life Insurance Company (Empire Life) and Aspiria Corp. (Aspiria) are pleased to announce the creation of a new Employee Assistance Program (EAP), AssistNow™, designed specifically for Empire Life Group Benefits customers.
AssistNow™ offers expert assistance to employees and their families, as well as to managers and company leaders. It includes confidential counselling, life coaching, health information, self-assessments, interactive training modules, management consultation, and a crisis management service.
“We are very pleased to offer our customers AssistNow™. An EAP is the ideal complement to an employee benefits plan. It helps employees and their families navigate life’s challenges and complex choices, and it provides expertise, coaching and crisis management to company leaders,” says Janet Jackson, Vice-President, Group Marketing. “We know that people are stressed by the demands of today’s fast-paced world, and that mental health issues are one of the top causes of productivity loss in the workplace. AssistNow™ offers affordable, reliable help in challenging times.”
“We are thrilled to be collaborating with Empire Life to offer their customers a fresh EAP. Empire Life and Aspiria share a focus on understanding the needs of small business and a commitment to quality, integrity and being easy to do business with. Working together, we can make the most of each other’s strengths and provide a high quality benefit to this underserviced market,” says Charles Benayon, Founder & CEO, Aspiria Corp.
About Empire Life
A subsidiary of E-L Financial Corporation Limited and in business since 1923, Empire Life helps Canadians build wealth and protect their financial security with competitive individual and group life and health insurance, investment and retirement products. The company’s vision is to be the leading, independently-owned, Canadian financial services company committed to simplicity, being easy to do business with and having a personal touch.
About Aspiria Corp.
Founded in 2003, Aspiria has taken over 30 years of industry best practices and created a complete continuum of care with Employee Assistance and Wellness Programs (EAP) dedicated to helping Canadian businesses excel through the power of their people. Aspiria is the newest EAP company in the industry, a boutique EAP provider with a national reach, that makes a difference in people’s lives when it matters most.
Contact:
Laurie Swinton
Manager, Corporate Communications, Empire Life
613 548-1890 ext. 3374 laurie.swinton@empire.ca
Charles Benayon
Founder & CEO, Aspiria Corp.
905-415-0500 ext.102 cbenayon@aspiria.ca
Managing the Risks of Workplace Violence and Harassment with EAP Support
Workplace violence and harassment adversely
affects individual employees, who suffer feelings of
guilt, anger, fear, isolation—and, in extreme instances,
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
To read more, please click on the link below to download the entire article.
Managing Workplace Violence and Harassment
EAPs More Available In Workplace
Where once Employee Assistance Programs were reactive, providing counselling to employees with, for example, alcohol abuse problems, today’s EAPs are being used proactively to help employees make lifestyles changes to ensure better health, thereby helping to reduce employer benefit costs.
EAPs (Employee Assistance Programs) are gaining acceptance at Canadian employers, especially large employers. Indeed, there is a greater acceptance by employers and employees alike, around the value of EAP services. For larger employers with more than 1,000 employees, Rod Phillips, president and CEO of Warren- Shepell, says 80 to 85 per cent have a program of some sort.
There are a number of reasons why EAPs are becoming more available in the workplace. One of the drivers was the events of 9/11. Throughout North America there was a sudden increase in the interest in EAPs as employers looked for ways to help employees traumatized by the events of that day. At Warren- Shepell, for example, the number of individuals served in the last three years has increased by almost 50 per cent.
Another reason for the rise in EAPs is the increased costs as the burden of healthcare is transferred to the workplace. Recently, Watson Wyatt suggested that the direct and indirect cost for healthcare to Canadian business is $33 billion. And employers can expect to carry even more of this healthcare burden. The aging population means there are more related health risks. Plus, Canadians will be expected to work longer to offset a tightening labour market, says Marcia Buchholz, executive director, Ceridian Lifeworks.
Total Benefits Package
Another noticeable trend in recent years is the development of partnerships between group insurers and EAP providers. Today all of the major insurance providers have partnerships with EAPs as these programs have become part of the total benefits package.
The reason EAPs came into existence back in the 1950s was because of substance abuse issues that were being experienced in organizations, says Charles Benayon, president and founder of Aspiria Corp. EAPs today offer counseling, worklife services, disability management, concierge services, legal services, financial services, and everything else you can think of,” including things like dog walking.
Where once the focus was on treatment of specific problems, today, the focus is really on prevention, says Buchholz. “Envision, for example, an employee health continuum. At the early stages of the continuum you’ve got a healthy employee. As they age, illness starts to cause multiple absences and then full disability which requires some sort of return-to-work program. EAPs are moving from the tail end of that continuum to really focusing on early identification of the issues and taking a preventive approach to help control the mounting costs of benefits.”
And another solution was needed, says Phillips. “We’ve had a whole generation of benefits providers focused around plan design. But you can only design a plan so many ways before you need to take a good look at that mounting equation. We looked at some statistics from one of our group benefits partners that showed that you’re seeing increases in benefit costs of thousands of dollars as people move from their 30s to their 40s.”
Upward Pressure
This upward pressure on overall benefits bills has employers asking ‘what are we doing about this?’ The answer is to try to manage these costs by changing behaviour in employees. EAPs endeavour to do this. “Yet, the common comment you get, and it’s entirely valid from a human resource leadership perspective, is we don’t have money for this new program. And that’s true in one sense,” says Phillips. “But, in another sense, they’re spending 10s of millions of dollars – in many organizations 100s of millions of dollars – around benefits costs. If you’re going to do that, you want to tell those organizations that there are some areas that they can focus on.” So if one of the areas of focus is, for example, around obesity, “then we know that eight to 10 per cent of people are going to use the EAP, so let’s promote the nutrition program. Let’s try to have a specific impact. We’ve got a program in place. We know that it works more times than it doesn’t. We know that it doesn’t cost anything close to the cost of medical interventions or treatments related to diseases that are connected to obesity,” says Phillips.
That idea of the relationship between overall benefits costs and what the EAP program can do to address these costs was present even when EAPs were introduced years ago. Now it’s more relevant because the costs are higher. There are two other shifts occurring here, says Phillips.
First, there has been an overall shift of acceptance of products including counselling. This is more of a societal shift. Individuals are more comfortable with the idea of getting help. Today, employee populations better understand the benefits of EAPs and other wellness programs.
Second, employers see that if they have a problem with obesity in the workplace, for example, and it’s costing a ton of money to pay for anti-cholesterol drugs, not to mention the cardiac drugs that follow or precede a heart attack, an EAP nutrition program – that’s quite inexpensive relative to the drugs – makes sense.
Behaviour Change
For success to happen, both the employer and EAP need to work together to develop a targeted, meaningful campaign that will impact lifestyle behaviour change among the employees. And that’s the real goal – behaviour change.
However, rather than looking at just one issue, EAP providers are trying to take a holistic approach to the employee. “We’re looking at all of the influencers that can have an affect on that employee, so it’s not just one program around smoking cessation, but looking at influencers such as personality, genetics, their home life, their lifestyle, their age, and what types of access to services that they have today,” says Buchholz.
“There is also a difference in terms of what we used to do. Rather than just oneoff types of interventions, we’re trying to package all of these together.” These include things such as stress prevention, nutrition counseling, lifestyle coaching, walking programs, education, and trying to affect all the intergenerational type of populations that employers have to try to find effective interventions for all employees.
The delivery of programs in terms of reaching out to employees has also changed. In the 1950s, if an employee had, for example, a drinking problem, their supervisor might take them aside and suggest that they get in touch with the EAP program to get some help.
Lifestyle Issues
While the EAP of 2006 still has that element, it may also be targeting lifestyle issues in an effort to prevent health issues which could have an impact on a company’s healthcare benefits costs. But, a supervisor can’t really suggest an employer get help for a weight problem because the employer wants to keep a lid on benefit costs.
So provider and employers now attempt to engage the employee in using the services, not just when they have an issue, but for lots of very positive reasons. “We find that if we can get the employees requesting information on nutrition counseling, for example, they’ve then accessed our service in a very friendly, non-threatening way. It starts to build their confidence to use our service when they really need us,” says Buchholz. “What we’ve had to do, when we’re looking at the wide variety of employees that are in the workplace these days, is come up with a lot of innovative ways to access our services. For example, there’s e-counseling where the employee can go in and confidentially use risk assessments on their own time at their own leisure with it remaining confidential and even autonomous in some situations. When you look at Gen-Xs and Gen-Ys, they want to be able to go in 24/7 and use these types of tools.”
However, there is also a responsibility to get management to not only buy into these programs, but to actually use them. “You can have all the great programs in place, but you’re throwing money hand over fist at a losing proposition if you are not determining root cause,” says Buchholz.
Organizational Effectiveness
As a result, the focus is not only on employee effectiveness, but on organizational effectiveness. For example, an employee attrition problem may be due to an ineffective supervisor or manager. So any interventions must couple employee and organizational effectiveness.
Managers must also learn that they represent the face of the organization. If they are burnt out or they are not leading by walking the talk, then it’s just words. They need to know how to deal with stress and also how to manage employees in a workplace that’s growing increasingly stressful.
While utilization of EAPs is still less than 10 per cent, this is changing. “When I first started in this business in the mid-1980s, one of the account manager’s jobs was to promote the services to organizations because the more you promote it, the more people will use the service. We were having a hard time getting employees to use the service. If we reached a five per cent level of utilization over a year, that was significant.
Today, the industry average is running between eight and 10 per cent of an organization’s population over a 12-month period,” says Benayon. Yet, while utilization rates in general are starting to shift upwards, the reasons for this shift are problematic.
Benayon says the increased usage is due to various reasons, but mostly because things are not great in companies. “People are suffering more from high levels of stress, depression, and from substance abuse. People are finding that their boundaries between their work life and home life are blurred and sometimes don’t even exist. Once, we were able to say ‘no, I’m leaving my work at work.’
Draw The Boundary
“With the advent of technology – computers, blackberries, and the like – the employee is mobile, and with mobility comes the challenge of where do you draw the boundary. Today, everybody we talk to that comes into the EAP, seems to be feeling so much stress because they can’t get home to their families, they can’t leave their work behind.” However, while employees at large companies can access EAPs to help them deal with these stresses, both Phillips and Benayon believe small to mid-sized organizations need to introduce EAPs into their companies as a way to tackle unhappy employees or employees with high stress. “They’re the ones who either don’t necessarily have a budget or can’t see the impact of an employee’s mental health on performance and, subsequently, how that’s going to affect the bottom line,” says Benayon. “They don’t necessarily see that by making an EAP available to employees where they can solve their problems, it will free up the manager from having to deal with the issues themselves, when there are so many other priorities management needs to focus on.”
Joe Hornyak is executive editor of Benefits and Pensions Monitor.
Corporate Wellness Returns $3.50
Corporate wellness programs are returning $3.50 for every dollar invested, says Dr. Dwight Chapin, clinic director at the High Point Wellness Centre.
Speaking on ‘Developing a Corporate Wellness Program: From Theory to Practice’ at the Industrial Accident Prevention Association’s ‘Partners in Prevention 2010: Ontario Health & Safety Conference & Trade Show,’ he said this increases to $4.30 when reduced absenteeism numbers are included.
Peer-viewed research on the impact of corporate wellness programs also shows that there is a 27 per cent reduction in sick leave absenteeism, a 26 per cent reduction in health costs, and a 32 per cent decline in workers’ compensation and disability claims. Where wellness once was a “nice” thing to have which was eliminated when budget cuts were needed, today it is a key strategy as businesses look to manage health costs, he said.
Source: Benefits & Pensions Monitor
Employers Running Out Of Options
Employers are frustrated and running out of options to cut healthcare costs, says Rob Crofts, vice-president, life and health, Corporate Benefit Analysts. Speaking on ‘The ROI of Workplace Wellness’ at the Medtronic of Canada Ltd. and Tri Fit ‘Diabetes Prevention in the Workplace: Sharing Best Practices Breakfast Symposium,’ he said today’s lifestyles are tomorrow’s claims as the aging demographic will lead to higher benefit plan costs.
For example, on average, a 42-year-old employee will submit $1,508 in annual health claims, while a 57-year-old will submit 50 per cent more, $2,255. However, with 70 per cent of ill health preventable, he said, employer objectives will change as they realize preventing illness is less expensive than treating it.
Source: Benefits & Pensions Monitor
Absenteeism Tracked Poorly
Canadian organizations generally do not track employee absenteeism well, even though rates – already high by international standards – are on the rise, says a Conference Board of Canada’s survey of employer-sponsored benefits, ‘Beyond Benefits II: Disability Plans and Absence Management in Canadian Workplaces.’ “Absenteeism rates reached their highest point in several years in 2008/09.
The implications of absenteeism for organizations are significant – both in terms of lost wages and productivity, and in the potential to substantially reduce costs through better management of their programs,” says Karla Thorpe, associate director, compensation and industrial relations. The first step to controlling absenteeism is to measure rates and direct costs. Organizations have traditionally focused on watching their long-term disability programs more closely than sick leave or short-term disability programs.
Yet, the survey found that an average of nine per cent of full-time employees were on short-term disability in 2008. The direct cost of absenteeism averaged 2.6 per cent of payroll in these organizations in 2008.
Source: Benefits & Pensions Monitor
