From breakfast radio to the front lines of workplace mental health, Karl Bennett has spent almost three decades shaping how employee assistance programmes support workers. As he celebrates his years in the sector, he warns HR leaders that without change, EAPs risk becoming little more than a tick-box exercise.
Karl Bennett’s career in radio seemed to be on a clear upward track. He’d spent four years as a breakfast presenter and was offered the network show many broadcasters dream of. The catch? Moving to London.
“They said, bring your wife so she can meet the team. My wife said, ‘Well, that’s not happening.’”
He needed to make a choice, career or family. “Obviously there’s no choice, when it comes to that, if your family says no,” he says.
Faced with limited progression in radio, Bennett looked elsewhere. “I thought, if I’m never going to be able to do what I want in radio, I need to leave. There was an advert for a service manager for a company called Care First, so I went to meet them. They rang me while I was on air and offered me the job. I handed in my notice. The rest is history.”
Three evolutions of EAP
For someone now widely considered a mental health champion, it might seem incongruous that after the first day of his new job, he thought: “I can’t do this. I don’t understand it.”
Clearly that changed as Bennett has been chair of the Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA) since 2023 and was re-elected in June to stay in post until 2027.
During his career, Bennett has held senior wellbeing roles at Vivup and Care First, and is currently owner and director of The Wellbeing Consortium.
In the years since he was offered a job while on air, Bennett says he has witnessed the EAP sector go through three distinct “evolutions” in how employers adopt and use them.
First, organisations recognised the need for mental health support for employees. “They’d talk to an EAP, get some consultation, and put a programme in to support the issues they were experiencing.”
The second evolution came with the 2002 test case Sutherland v Hatton. Lady Justice Hale cited workplace counselling in her judgment.
“An employer who offers a confidential advice service, with referral to appropriate counselling or treatment services, is unlikely to be found in breach of duty,” it read, broadly meaning that employers that offer employees access to counselling were covered from a duty of care point of view.
“That opened the floodgates,” Bennett says. “People picked up the phone and said: ‘We need an EAP’, they didn’t really know why, it just ticked the duty-of-care box.”
The pandemic was the catalyst for a third evolution. Bennett says that as Covid-19 struck, there were warnings there would be a mental health pandemic as well.
“The phones went again. Organisations just said: ‘I need an EAP.’”
From consultative to commodity
With more people now having access to an EAP you might think this was positive. However, Bennett says that what came with it was the erosion of the consultative role.
“When organisations are saying, we need an EAP as a tick box, it doesn’t work. And I think that’s the biggest change that I’m seeing within EAP generally. We used to speak to organisations in a consultative capacity. They would tell us what was happening, such as major organisational change, a pay review, redundancies, or a merger, and say ‘we need to know the best way we can help our employees through this process.’”
But now, Bennett says organisations think they understand what an EAP is and can do. “So when they need that expertise, all they need is to say, I need an EAP now. What’s the cheapest EAP?”
Price pressures, he argues, have led directly to reduced service quality. “When you’re charging little amounts of money for services, unfortunately, what that means is you can’t provide people with immediate and direct access to counsellors.”
He says: “It costs around £45 to deliver a counselling session, and if your organisation is having 100 sessions, you can’t be charged less than £4,500.
“If your new provider is telling you that they can provide that service for £500, I think you’ve got to be smarter as a purchaser and ask the EAP, how are you doing this?”
Changing employee mindsets
Bennett has also seen a shift in how employees view EAPs. “They ring up the EAP and they say: ‘My manager’s told me I’m entitled to six sessions, so that’s what I want,’ rather than saying to the counsellor: ‘This is my issue,’ and trusting that counsellor to support them.
“It’s almost like turning up to A&E and saying, ‘I’m entitled to an operation, can you take out my appendix?’”
Instead, he says use should be driven by need, not entitlement. “What employers should be focusing on is supporting their people before they get to that point of need.”
Family pressures
In his view, the most urgent mental health issue for employers today is the impact of family pressures, particularly children’s mental health.
“We’re seeing more mental health issues within children, which means we’re seeing more absence within those organisations where people are having to go home to support their children, or elderly relatives.”
It’s an issue with a clear diversity dimension. Bennett says if employers and EAPs don’t support family units, businesses will lose really valuable people, often the women.
What EAPs do best
Bennett is wary of EAPs continuing to be wellbeing “one-stop shops” trying to provide everything from GP services to financial coaching.
“This really concerns me, EAPs trying to be everything for everybody. That’s driven by both sides. So employers are saying to employees, regardless of what the issue is, you can pick up the phone and you can speak with EAP. Because of that, EAPs have had to become experts in everything.
“But you can’t be an expert in everything, so what you do is you reach out and you speak to suppliers that can provide that help for you. So you plug in an online GP service, because EAPs are not GP services. You plug in financial services, you plug in physio, you plug in peer to peer support. You plug in different services, but all of those things are provided by the EAP, so they’ve become kind of a one stop shop.
“What needs to happen now is EAPs need to focus on what they do well, which is provide quality clinical services. Don’t expect them to do everything else. Let those experts provide that service.”
He sees an alternative in integrated platforms where the EAP is one plug-in alongside others, each delivered by the most qualified provider.
Technology and data
Digital tools and AI have a role, Bennett says, but not as a first point of contact. “The best support somebody will ever get is that real human interaction. AI will be able to follow up. I think that’s the future of it, but right now, it’s not quite there.”
More immediately, he sees data as the missing link between HR and EAP value.
“What HR and EAPs need is an evolution around the data that comes from an EAP. Data will drive the value, more than anything else, and right now the data being provided by EAPs is pretty weak.”
Employers currently receive data on the number of people that have called the service, how many of them are new, how many sessions have been provided, and what types of issues were involved.
This is because the data has got to be confidential and aggregated. But Bennett questions how useful this really is to HR.
He suggests that data that helps HR to identify trends so they can take action would be more useful. This requires a shift in employer mindset.
His advice for HR and benefits teams is clear. “Understand why you need the services that you’ve got. Engage with the service providers in a consultative way. Don’t try to retrofit a solution to something that’s already happened. Use the expertise of those providers.”
He’s forthright about procurement too. “Stop using Google search for the best EAP provider, because you’re always going to get the same one, the one that spends all their money on search terms. Ask other organisations in your sector what’s worked for them.”
Bennett’s comments come from his commitment to the success of the sector. “I’m so privileged to work in the industry. We’ve got millions of people in this country being supported by a service that I get the opportunity to help shape. I’d love to do it for another 30 years, but it’s going to be a very different landscape.”
Karl’s 4 Essentials for Better EAP Value
- Engage providers before a crisis hits
- Pay for quality, if it’s too cheap, ask why.
- Use data to measure real change, not just activity.
- Support the whole family unit to protect your workforce.
