The evaluation of an insourced employee assistance programme

D.Comm.The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate an insourced Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) over a one year period in terms of impact evaluation (utilisation and client's satisfaction with the programme) and efficiency evaluation (cost-effectiveness). Such evaluation studies are becoming increasingly important in the current era of organisational downsizing and coping with resource constraints. A client satisfaction survey was used to assess client's satisfaction with the program, while data obtained from the management information system of the company was used to compute both the utilisation rate as well as the cost-effectiveness of the programme. The utilisation rate was computed to be 5.2% which is within the acceptable range as posited by the available literature. The utilisation rate was further examined in terms of the demographics of the client population as well as that of the EAP. The demographic information revealed that the most common problem addressed by the EAP was marital problems (37.8%). Another finding of note was the very high percentage of management / mandatory referrals. Supervisor feedback reports indicated that the most common problem amongst employees that resulted in referral was absenteeism and morale. Supervisors rated involvement in incidents /accidents and absenteeism as being the constructs that improved the most with EAP intervention. The survey of EAP clients (self-referrals) suggested that the majority of clients were satisfied with the overall quality of EAP services. Computation of the cost-benefit ratio revealed that for every R1.00 invested in the EAP between R5 and R8 was saved in terms of recovered lost productivity