"but We're Too Small For A Program . . ."

 

By day she was an office manager; by night she managed crises. The Lincoln, Neb., woman had become the one person in the tiny organization to whom fellow employees brought their troubles. And she loved playing the role of counselor -- until the late-night telephone calls became too numerous, and the problems too emotionally burdensome.

She and her bosses agreed it was time to lighten her load, perhaps establish an employee assistance program -- but how? The company, which numbers its employees in the dozens, didn't think it would be cost-effective to spend $5,000 to $7,500 to set up a program that might benefit only two or three employees a year. Instead, they went to Lincoln Employee Assistance Program Inc. (LEAP), an EAP service center that counts as members 45 other Lincoln-area companies, ranging in size from 11 employees to 3,000.

The office manager still offers a listening ear, but when the problems overwhelm her, she can call in the professionals. The company pays for the counseling on a fee-for-service basis.

"A lot of our smallest companies come to us like that," says Kristine Brennan, executive director of LEAP. "It seems there's always one person -- maybe the office manager, maybe the personnel director -- who gets stuck in a semicounselor role. Eventually it causes a lot of role-conflict problems -- not to mention problems of confidentiality, liability, and manageability -- and they begin to look for outside help. Larger companies can afford their own EAPs, but most of our smaller companies don't even entertain the idea. They just don't have the resources or the organizational system to do it."

The concept of an EAP service center (also referred to as a consortium, when member companies control it) is relatively new. Scores of organizations -- ranging from LEAP's parent agency, a regional mental health center, to a resort association serving the Colorado ski towns of Aspen and Snowmass, to the Taunton, Mass., Chamber of Commerce -- received government funding to start this group-plan approach to employee assistance in the mid-1970s. Not all of them survived, but many did, and they have since become self-supporting.

The treatment programs offered by service centers or consortia are more generic than the individually tailored programs offered by contract providers, but that is where the drawbacks end. For companies with fewer than 100 employees, joining such an organization is perhaps the only means of offering qualified treatment, confidentially and at a reasonable cost. Best of all, Brennan says, it offers peace of mind. "Just about every small company knows what it's like to lose an employee to his or her problems -- to be stuck without the mechanism to help. They don't want it to happen again. 'Even if none of my employees use the EAP,' they tell me, 'at least they'll know it's there."