Spill Therapy reliably reduces mental health symptoms in 72% of cases and can be accessed by anyone on your team.
Quick summary:
- Employers in the UK must be compliant with the Equality Act 2010 and Health and Safety Act etc 1974, and also have a legal responsibility for the wellbeing of their employees.
- This is known as a ‘duty of care’ and means protecting the physical and psychological health, safety, and welfare of your employees (and others) while at work.
- Employee assistance programmes can support your duty of care as an employer but they do not fulfil it completely.
- To fulfil your duty of care, you must make a proactive effort to find out about an employee’s wellbeing and provide individual support.
The phrase ‘employee assistance programme’, or ‘EAP’, has become somewhat synonymous with employee wellbeing. The relatively low cost of EAPs (from as little as 40p per employee, per month) and the variety of services they provide has made them a popular way for companies to seemingly look after their team’s mental health. But is this all you need to do as an employer? Let’s find out more about your legal responsibilities, what ‘duty of care’ really means, and how EAPs (or modern EAP alternatives like Spill) can help.
Mental health at work: legal responsibilities as an employer
When it comes to mental health at work, employers in the UK must be compliant with the Equality Act 2010 and the Health and Safety Act etc 1974. This means that you must make sure (a) not to discriminate against any employee with a mental health condition that classifies as a disability and (b) protect employees against undue stress. In response to (a), you’ll need to make sure your hiring, onboarding, and working practices are all audited to ensure they avoid discrimination while for (b) you’ll need to carry out a risk assessment for stress at work and take action based on its findings.
If you’re in a UK-based company, you also have a legal responsibility as an employer to ensure the wellbeing of your employees. This is known as a ‘duty of care’ and is what we’re going to focus on for the remainder of this article.
Employers have a legal responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of their employees.
What is an employer's duty of care?
As an employer in the UK, it's your duty to protect the health, safety, and welfare of your employees. That means doing whatever you can (within reason, of course) to protect your workers from any risks arising from work activities. Keep in mind this doesn’t just mean physical risks: emotional and psychological risks are just as important to your team’s physical health, safety, and welfare. For example, just as you make sure workers in a factory need to wear protective gloves and eye shields if they’re working with drills, you need to make sure desk-based staff have adequate protection against psychological risks such as burnout, undue work stress, and anxiety.
An employer’s duty of care is to protect the physical and emotional health, safety, and welfare of your team and others while they are at work.
The Health and Safety at Work Act is the main legislation covering occupational health and safety in the UK, which sets out the duties employers have towards employees and members of the public, as well as the duties employees have to themselves and to each other.
As an employer, you need to consider:
While a lot of the language used in health and safety information evokes images of building sites and factory floors (i.e. practical jobs that really do come with great health and safety risks), it's important to remember that this duty of care also extends to desk-based teams: the hazards might feel smaller but the welfare of your team is just as important.
Spill is typically used by 50% of employees in a year. That means up to 10 times as many people get support vs. an EAP.
How does an EAP support an employer’s duty of care?
According to the Health and Safety Executive’s 2021/2022 statistics, 1.8 million working people suffered from a work-related illness. And of that number, a massive 50% of workers experienced work-related stress, depression, or anxiety.
In other words, your duty of care to your employee’s mental health is an important responsibility.
EAPs are programmes designed to care for your team’s wellbeing. Most commonly known for providing counselling services, they can also offer financial and legal advice, training and development, and support when it comes to work-life balance. So what does this mean in terms of duty of care?
💙 EAPs give employees access to services that can support their mental and emotional wellbeing
The counselling offered by EAPs is designed to be short-term, solution-focused counselling that helps employees manage personal or work-related issues that may be affecting their ability to perform their job properly. Helping employees manage their emotions can in turn help reduce the likelihood of accidents or incidents. For example, someone experiencing anxiety might be struggling to sleep at night and a lack of sleep can lead to sluggishness, brain fog, slow reactions, difficulty concentrating, and reduced problem-solving skills. By making use of EAP counselling, that individual may be able to manage their thoughts to finally get some proper rest.
🔎 EAPs can help to find and manage potential workplace hazards that could impact the health and safety of employees
Regular interaction with EAP services like counselling, training, and other forms of support can help a company identify and address issues before they become significant problems. For example, if your EAP provides anonymous usage data, you might learn that a number of your employees are using the EAP to deal with work-related stress (don’t worry here, the specific detail of an employees’ interaction with an EAP really does remain confidential). This could signal a company-wide problem that needs addressing.
🧠 EAPs provide training to managers and supervisors to help them spot signs of mental health issues in their team
As an employer, it’s your duty to help your team with (and prevent) work-related illnesses, both physical and emotional. Introducing an EAP into your company can help raise awareness of mental health company-wide. Some providers offer mental health training and if yours doesn’t, it’s worthwhile pursuing this separately. By upskilling managers and supervisors to spot signs of distress or mental health challenges in their teams, they can help their reports access the support they need. A company with a more honest and open culture around mental health is more likely to engage with mental health support, and that in turn, will help reduce the number of workplace accidents and risks.
Do EAPs fulfil an employer’s duty of care for mental health?
While EAPs can certainly help with your duty of care as an employer, it’s worth considering whether they completely fulfil your duty of care when it comes to mental health.
The short answer is, no: EAPs do not completely satisfy your duty of care when it comes to your team’s mental health. The reason for this is because despite offering support, EAPs aren’t accessed by everyone and they aren’t proactive: EAP support is only available if someone is already experiencing difficulties. It’s not a preventative service.
Take the legal case of Intel v Law in 2007, when an employee experienced a breakdown caused by chronic depression as a result of her excessive workload. While the company said that the employee failed to access the external counselling services in place, the Court of Appeal disagreed, saying that an employer’s short-term counselling wouldn’t have reduced the risk of a breakdown because it wouldn’t reduce her workload.
This decision marked an important moment: the Court of Appeal made it clear here that despite having support systems in place for staff, management failed to combat known work-related stress. And that means they failed to discharge their duty of care owed to their staff.
In short: unless you, as a company, make a proactive effort to find out about wellbeing and provide individual support to those who need it, you have not fulfilled your duty of care.
To fulfil their duty of care, a company must make a proactive effort to find out about an employee’s wellbeing and provide individual support.
How to fulfil your duty of care for mental health
Remember that table from earlier? Well, here it is again but this time, we’ve added a handy column highlighting just how Spill can help you with your duty of care to your team.
It goes without saying that while Spill has many features that support the mental welfare of your team, it shouldn’t be a replacement for a proper plan to minimise these risks in the first place. Remember: to fulfil your duty of care, you must make a proactive effort to find out about an employee’s wellbeing and provide individual support.
For more thoughts on looking after your team, check out our list of 51 actionable initiatives to improve your team’s mental health and wellbeing. Your duty of care as an employer is an important responsibility, so take the time to really think about how you can look after your team (and yourself!) in the kindest and safest way possible.
Spill is typically used by 50% of employees in a year. That means up to 10 times as many people get support vs. an EAP.
