Barriers to Workplace Stress Interventions in Employee Assistance Practice: EAP Perspectives

Abstract

Occupational health literature links stressful working conditions with cardiovascular and other chronic diseases, injuries, and psychological distress. We conducted individual interviews with employee assistance professionals (EAPs) to understand opportunities and barriers for EAPs to address job stress through organization level interventions. EAPs described their primary role as assisting individual employees versus designing company wide interventions. The most salient barriers to organization level interventions cited were lack of access to company management and (for contracted EAPs) perceptions of contract vulnerability. Education about workplace stress interventions may be most effectively directed at EAPs who are already integrated with company level work groups.

KEYWORDS:

• employee assistance practice
• job stress
• stress interventions
• stress reduction
• work organization
• workplace interventions
• workplace stress

The Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace is supported by Grant Number 1 U19 OH008857 from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) (CDC). This work is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NIOSH. The authors are grateful for the assistance of Peter Sullivan, CEAP, and David Worster, CEAP, for their review and input on this article. We thank the Massachusetts–Rhode Island Chapter of Employee Assistance Professionals Association for assistance with recruitment and their continuing support and dialogue on the topic of job stress. And finally, we acknowledge the contributions of Deborah Van Langen, MS, who conducted the initial interviews, and Julie Brodie, MA, who assisted with word processing and references.