Search results

Personal problems of employees impair their productivity. These may be family, emotional, alcohol or other drugs, or just living problems. Employee assistance is an action‐oriented programme designed to recognise symptoms of problem employees before they become costly to the employee as well as to the company. Several studies are reviewed, those by government, as well as many private agencies, concerning the effectiveness of establishing employee assistance programmes as opposed to firing and replacing employees who have personal problems that may impair their productivity and performance.

The US origination of employee assistance programmes is described and then their essential features and a systemic framework and guidelines appropriate to UK adoption are set out.

A recent article by P.B. Beaumont focused attention on the problem of alcoholism in British industry. Beaumont discussed the need for organisations to have policies for dealing with employee alcoholism and he identified a number of factors likely to be associated with successful policies. The article was quite stimulating and, accordingly, I thought it would be instructive to describe what American organisations are doing with respect not only to employee alcoholism but also the problems of drug and other emotional difficulties affecting job performance. Specifically, this article is devoted to a more thorough description of american employee assistance programmes and a discussion of some of the factors that have been found important to their successful implementation. Hopefully this information could be helpful to British as well as other American firms that continue to grapple with these kinds of problems.

In 1983 a group of nurses from the state of Colorado, US, convened to discuss the issues related to substance abuse among their colleagues. The absence of peer support for colleagues experiencing problems with addictions, and regulatory licensure sanction was of serious concern to them. They first determined that nurses themselves should provide services to nurses and students of nursing with substance abuse problems. After a review of the other state efforts, they concurred that the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offered the comprehensive model of service delivery they envisioned. Originally incorporated in 1984 as NURSES (Nurses United for Recovery, Support and Education Successfully) of Colorado Corporation, this group also viewed the EAP as an important strategy to operationalise professional self‐regulation (Pace, 1990).This paper focuses on employee assistance programming, provided by nurses, as an effective workplace intervention strategy for the identification and referral to treatment of nurses affected by substance abuse and dependence.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between different organisational development programmes (360-degree feedback; Coaching; Job assignment; Employee assistance programmes; On-the-job training; Web-based career information; Continuous professional development; External education provision) and employees’ career development. The implications of the moderating effects of gender on the relationships between these eight organisational programmes and career development are assessed.

To examine hypothesised relationships on eight organisational programmes and career development, this paper computed moderated regression analyses using the PROCESS macro (3.5), for a two-way analysis of variance (Hayes, 2018). The data collected are based on a survey sample of employees (n = 322) working in Scotland.

Two main findings arose from this empirical study. First, there are significant direct relationships between seven out of the eight organisational development programmes and their influences on employees’ career development. Second, gender is a significant moderator for four of the programmes’ relationship with career development, namely, coaching, web-based career information, continuous professional development and external education provision. However, gender failed to moderate the four other programmes’ (i.e. 360-degree feedback, job assignment, employee assistance programmes and on-the-job training) relationship with career development.

This paper concludes that closer attention should be given to the organisational design of these development programmes and consideration of potential gender differences in employees’ perception of their importance for career development in their organisation. To date, the majority of research in the literature has concentrated on the impact of training on career development, so this study contributes to the body of knowledge on a set of organisational development programmes and their effect on career development moderated by gender.

Problems arise in attempting to evaluate Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP) in the widest sense. Terms such as “evaluation”, and “benefits” are regarded as potentially complex, as is the adequate definition of what constitutes “employee assistance”. Studies concerned both with alcohol programmes and with stress management are reviewed; specific problems are highlighted. Methodology and the appropriateness of the traditional scientific method are much discussed. “Meta‐evaluation” is proposed to run concurrently with the unravelling of methodological questions in order to address the interfacing of programmes with other sections of the organisation, and the extent to which environmental and organisational factors rather than individuals are targeted for change.

The use of Employee Assistance Programmes in the UK has seen a marked upturn in the past year. Four main types of organisation use these programmes: those which already have them in the USA, and those concerned about safety, effects of rapid change, or staff retention. Motivation to introduce EAPs may be influenced by the decision to have a programme either positively (gain staff welfare benefit) or negatively (avoid losses through sickness, absenteeism, staff turnover) reinforced. The basic EAP concept is to prevent performance impairment by identifying and resolving employees′ personal problems at the earliest possible stage without risk to employee′s job. Five components of the system are detailed: policy decision and programme design: training and orientation of key staff: communication to all employees and families: counselling and referral service: programme evaluation. There are three main advantages of such a system: staff benefit, manager support, cost saving giving a low‐cost programme with one‐year payback with evidence of 4:1 savings‐to‐investment ratios.

Employee assistance programmes have developed since the early 1940s, particularly in North America, and are now part of many UK companies′ benefits packages for their staff (particularly in North America). Details the development, philosophy, structure and practice of the British Airways Employee Assistance Programme.

This article addresses the rationales employed for the introduction of employee assistance or advisory programmes (EAPs) in UK organisations. It examines typological conceptions of rationales for the introduction of EAPs which are appraised in relation to a study of the introduction of UK based EAP programmes and the literature on organisational interventions. The article concludes that more support is offered for organisational change as a rationale for EAP introduction than for more humanistic considerations, which appear to be better related to managers’ work roles. An extended discussion examines the residual role that welfare seems to play in modern HRM strategies and how current explanations of EAP programmes based on counselling models would benefit from input from models of consultancy processes.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.