Supervisors/Managers

Often, you are the first one that is aware of the personal concerns of your employees. You notice a change in a valuable employee - that they seem to be having more "bad days," or are making more errors, or are more distracted, or increasingly using their sick leave. Perhaps you are getting more complaints against them from customers or co-workers, or their performance or their work relationships have deteriorated. Sometimes you konw what's causing the difficulties, sometimes you don't. Sometimes they come to you for advice, sometimes they don't want you to know as they don't want their personal issues to impact their job.

As this progresses, you may even find it hard to do your own job well because of your concerns about an employee, or find that the difficulty starts expanding and taking more space in your organization. You may find that dealing with some challenging employee or employees is the most difficult part of your job. You may have spent sleepless nights worrying about finding a solution to an employee's problems. The difficulty starts getting worse instead of better.

While all employees (as well as managers and supervisors) have bad days, you should become concerned when an employee's behaviors are obviously out of character or start to become chronic. These behaviors at work may indicate that the employee is having some kind of personal challenge or difficulty that is starting to impact their job. These are the kinds of issues your EAP can help them with, and you can always refer them to their EAP. If you're not sure how to do this, feel free to call us before intervening. We'd be happy to coach you on how to gently let people know about their EAP benefit, as well as how you can strongly suggest EAP if their performance or troubling behavior does not change.

Remember that you are not expected to be an expert on all the isses that may trouble your employees. You are not supposed to be their marriage counselor, their 12-step sponsor, their health and wellness coach, or their diagnostician. You are not supposed to be and expert who makes great recommendations for them: who's a good counselor for their kid with ADD, where can they get support for dealing with their aging Auntie, how can they find a good dog walker, what they should do because they just got served divorce papers or their kid ran away or their adult daughter is pregnant or Uncle is a drunk or.....