2017 was an exciting year for INSITE. In this article, we will take a rather personal look back on the last twelve months: What did we see the greatest demand for? How important was case management? What were the seminar topics and formats that were increasingly in demand?
EAP: A Day in the Life
An employee assistance programme is a tool for supporting employees in all facets of life. Employers help their employees to remain balanced even in tough situations and to use their self-management skills to overcome challenging situations with the best possible outcome.
And it's not just about work-related issues. Personal issues have a major impact on a person's general ability to perform because it's hard to simply leave these issues at the door, and worries over family matters can follow people around all day long.
This is very much evident in our numbers from last year, too. Around 1/3 of all requests received related to personal issues, such as marriage/partnership/family, children and parenting, childcare and caring for family members, accounting for the second-highest number of cases.
More than 40% of all cases relate to mental load, e.g. depression/anxiety, burnout/fatigue or work stress/overload.
We are seeing a clear trend of rising demand for other services such as medical consultations and Find a Consultant.
Feedback
Our clients' employees also gave us excellent feedback on our assistance services in 2017. The question of whether employees found the assistance to be helpful received very good scores on average. The same goes for respondents' willingness to recommend our services. This second point is particularly encouraging because we also offer our assistance services to family members of our clients' employees.
Find a Therapist/Find a Consultant, case management and guiding employees through the process
Despite attempts by legislators to improve advice and support for patients with urgent needs (see our blog post on the mental health consultation), we are still seeing strong demand for our Find a Therapist and Find a Consultant services. The number of requests we are receiving from employees looking for help finding treatment or an appointment with a consultant has roughly tripled compared to two years ago. For us, this is an important sign that getting affected employees into further treatment quickly remains an important part of the INSITE EAP.
Our efforts to continuously expand our case management system are also having a tangible impact. INSITE case managers guide employees who get in touch through the entire process, from initial contact to assistance to closing their case. As a result, our colleagues are now spending twice as much time on case management as they did two years ago. An investment that provides comprehensive assistance to affected employees and guarantees that they get the support they ask for.
Seminars
Our range of seminars has also increased nicely compared to the previous year. We held around 15% more events than in 2016 – with around 44% of those half-day events. We can see a clear trend here towards shorter activities. Our "Stress Control" event series reflects this preference, offering four 1-hour sessions for the many companies that either can't or don't want to book in longer seminars.
Around 75% of all seminars are trainings on "Healthy Working", "Healthy Management" or a combination of the two. There is a clear trend developing here, too, with managers being given a greater role when it comes to the mental fitness of their employees. Many companies still want to take the opportunity to give their employees more resources as a preventative method for boosting their resilience.
You can find an overview of the seminars and seminar series we offer here. We are also more than happy to put together individual concepts for your company's target groups, such as trainers or trainees.
INSITE looks forward to another year of working with its partners, clients and their employees and to helping them keep themselves and their organisations mentally fit and raring to go.
