The Power of EAP Data in Informing the Broader Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy
At Acacia we believe that a successful Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is built on a strong foundation of partnership between ourselves and the customers we work with. Central to this partnership approach are our team of dedicated Workplace Wellbeing Consultants (WWC’s). More than just Account Managers, our WWC’s are responsible for working with customer key contacts, in order to cultivate workplace environments where employees are able to feel understood, supported and empowered.
With industry aligned customer portfolios, a passion for Mental Health in the Workplace and years of experience in partnering with organisations, Acacia WWC’s also have access to industry leading data dashboards, that assist them in transforming their customers data into easily understood narratives that in turn, can highlight areas of concern and opportunity.
To understand how Acacia’s WWC’s work with their customers, we sat down with Dale Eldridge, Customer Experience Manager, to understand how his team utilise trends and insights to improve the mental health and wellbeing of employees throughout the country.
What is the role of Workplace Wellbeing Consultants?
Our WWC’s aim to raise awareness of positive mental health practices by closely collaborating with businesses. This goal is designed to combat the stigma surrounding mental health. Key importance is placed upon personalisation and making sure strategies are based on a business’s unique needs and goals. This personalised approach is achieved through extracting EAP data that allows for understanding the demographic, psychosocial risk factors and unique characteristics that form a specific organisation. We take a tailored approach, aiming to align with culture objectives and aspirations.
How do WWC's help shape an organisation's Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy?
We are proud to create customised, proactive, and preventive support solutions for our clients, often blending our individual and organisational services to effectively meet their needs. Acacia’s distinctive partnership model promotes collaboration and data-driven decision-making. Our team utilise high quality business intelligence and dashboard reporting to deliver insightful recommendations tailored to each client’s specific needs and challenges identified through industry-focused reporting.
What reporting do your team, and their customers have access to?
One of Acacia’s primary strengths is the use of customised reporting on EAP utilisation. We employ Power BI to analyse and present this data, providing a comprehensive and insightful approach to data intelligence. Updated daily, our unique dashboards enhance standard reporting, offering Acacia a deeper understanding of key areas of focus or concern for our customers, and their people. We monitor essential clinical and demographic trends, along with customer and industry-specific patterns. Therefore, we can benchmark an organisation’s trends against industry peers, allowing us to proactively identify changes in EAP data trends that may indicate emerging issues or trends within a particular employee group.
How is Acacia EAP Data shared with your customers?
Our customers can expect regular monthly, quarterly and annual reports which provide a breakdown of all employees who reached out and connected with us within a particular period. These reports are of course de-identified to protect the anonymity of our clients (our customers’ employees) but do pull together demographic identifiers to give insight into particular cohorts.
Our team organises periodical meetings with our clients to review reports, conduct analysis of data, and identify emerging patterns. In return we then offer proactive recommendations related to clinical initiatives and wellbeing education to our clients to address any problems that have arisen.
Within these client meetings, our WWC’s will also share their insight dashboards with our customers. Utilising Power BI, these reports are dynamic, and really allow a deep dive into correlating factors and in essence bring the data to life.
Most excitingly perhaps, is our recently launched Customer Insight Dashboards. While we always enjoy the opportunity to meet with customers and share our recommendations, we recognise that the data truly belongs to them, as it is collected from their team. To return this data without breaching confidentiality or compromising individual anonymity, we have created a customer centric, Self-Service Dashboard. Accessible anytime and from anywhere, our dashboards empower customers to view trends and insights in real time!
How can these reports benefit an organisation?
Data extracted from EAP Insights can be leveraged by organisations to improve the current state of their employee’s wellbeing needs. In response, this can escalate into greater employee retention rates and job satisfaction, enriched workplace culture and management of psychosocial risk factors that can impact employees.
Having access to rich and reliable data sets both through traditional reporting and our Live Dashboards, also ensures appropriate proactive and reactive strategy adjustment. When we notice an increase in a particular presenting concern, or the potential emergence of a psychosocial hazard – this can be met in an informed way. Moreover the effectiveness of the solution provided to the situation can also be quickly gauged.
In your opinion, what are some Key Statistics Provided by Acacia?
EAP utilisation rates – This is a vital indicator of a problem being well-received and being an effective method in focusing on employee needs. While demographic and utilisation trends can differ between industries and the size of an organisation, our highly qualified team of WWC’s have the skills and experience needed to understand these nuances for each and every customer.
How an Employee Learnt of EAP – A crucial statistic l when considering the overall communication strategy being adopted by our partners. Understanding how employees are being encouraged to reach out, helps to align future strategies while also highlighting ineffective communication channels that might require revisiting.
Alignment to Company Goals – Each organisation is unique and each has different motivators and success indicators of EAP within their business. For this reason, we give our customers the option to create specific onboarding questions, which when answered by their employees can add a more specific and relevant richness to the data set program.
With a 97% retention rate across all our customers, year on year – Acacia believes that employee trends and insights delivered by an industry aligned Workplace Wellbeing Consultant is an absolute must for an effective employee assistance program.
At Acacia Connection, our Wellbeing Consultants are committed to promoting mental health in the workplace. By utilising data, providing personalised and tailored support, we help organisations to cultivate environments where their employees can thrive.
We would love to explore with you what an effective EAP Program looks like, and it would be our pleasure to outline the other foundational elements that set us apart as a true partner in your peoples’ Mental Health and Wellbeing. You can reach out to us here.
Blog Contributors:
Dale has over a decade experience working within the EAP industry and has supported numerous leading Australian companies in the design, implementation and management of their EAP, and broadly their Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. As Customer Experience Manager, Dale leads Acacia’s team of Workplace Wellbeing Consultants and manages Acacia’s Tender Response Team.
