Why your EAP is underused (and what employees are too afraid to say)

You’ve heard it before. “We’ve got an EAP if you need it.” Said with good intentions, stuck on a poster in the lunchroom, but for most employees, it’s money down the drain, writes Suzi Evans.

Because if you’re already crying in the car before work, your inbox is bursting, projects are coming at you from every angle, and childcare calls to say your kid’s sick (again) … a hotline on a fridge magnet just isn’t going to cut it.

Despite most medium to large Australian organisations offering Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), research shows that most Australians have never used them.

The typical uptake? Just 5 per cent of eligible employees per year, meaning only 1 in 20 eligible employees typically use these services in a given year.

So the question is … what’s really going on here?

The poster of the hunched-over, broken person? It’s time to retire it.

Employees are exhausted, overwhelmed, or quietly drowning – but unsure if it’s “serious enough” to justify a session.

They spot the poster in the bathroom – you know, the one with the stock photo of someone slumped over looking broken – and think, “That’s not me.”

Not yet, anyway.

So they don’t call. They just keep pushing through. They tell themselves it’s not that bad.

And that’s the problem. If the only image is someone at rock bottom, we miss everyone else who is quietly falling apart. Most employees aren’t facing a single crisis – they’re carrying cumulative stress. But the support on offer doesn’t reflect that.

It’s both a branding problem and a systems problem. When help is framed as a last resort, people wait. They minimise. And by the time they reach out? They’re burnt out, checked out, or facing an eight-week wait to see a psychologist – especially in rural areas. We need to rethink how we talk about support, and we must reconsider how we support the people in the grey zone. Still showing up. Still doing their job. Still smiling.

Stigma, fear, and the ‘HR trap’

Then there’s the fear factor. Employees regularly tell me they worry EAPs aren’t really confidential. Some assume their employer will be notified if they use it. Others worry they’ll be perceived as unstable, unprofessional, or “not up to the job”. Whether that fear is accurate or not, it’s real enough to stop them picking up the phone.

There’s also the issue of accessibility. Many staff don’t even know how to contact their EAP provider – let alone what kind of support they’re entitled to or who will be on the other side of the phone call. If your EAP is buried in the intranet, rarely mentioned beyond induction, or limited to a phone number on a flyer in the lunchroom, it’s not reaching the people who need it most.

So, what do employees actually need?

It’s not as simple as chucking the EAP in the bin and declaring some shiny new alternative. This isn’t an either/or scenario. What’s missing is a bit of proactivity.

In my work as a mental health educator, accredited MHFA trainer and mental fitness facilitator, I walk into plenty of workplaces where the EAP is technically “there” – laminated poster, fridge magnet, the lot – but I’m fairly confident almost no one’s ever used it.

Here’s what employees tell me they wish they had instead:

Real conversations around wellbeing and mental health

Education and conversation that normalise mental health and reduce stigma. Not corporate posters. Not once-a-year wellbeing emails from HR. But honest, human conversations that normalise mental health and reduce the stigma. If your boss opens up about their mental health, it sends a loud, clear message: you’re safe to talk about yours too. It shifts the vibe from “just tough it out” to “you’re not alone”.

Focus on mental fitness

A focus on mental fitness – not just fixing burnout once it hits. Employees want tools to manage the stress before it spirals. What habits help? What actually works? What does mental fitness actually look like in real life during stressful work weeks?

What tools are on your workbench?

When it comes to mental health support, it’s often zero-to-psychologist. There’s not much available in between. Very little is recognised or encouraged between being “fine” and needing professional help.

This became loud and clear for me in the most personal of ways. My son, Muzz, took his own life just shy of his 30th birthday. Since then, I’ve become almost single-minded about asking people: what wellbeing tools do you have on your workbench? Muzz was a carpenter, and his favourite place was the workbench. Just like he kept his bench stocked with the right tools for the job, I believe we all need a mental version – a workbench of strategies and supports we can reach for everyday AND when life gets tough.

That idea never left me. So I created Workbench for the Mind – a practical, self-paced accredited program with Suicide Prevention Australia. We should all do this more often – take stock of the tools we already have, and the ones we still need. What tools do you lean on to get through daily challenges and stress? What habits are helping you, and what patterns might be holding you back?

Because if your workbench was empty and in disarray, you wouldn’t get much done. The same goes for your mental health. The question is: what tools are you choosing to put on your bench?

Flexibility and accessibility

A significant proportion of employees prefer to access mental health support outside of work hours and settings. Over 50 per cent want to access programs independently in person, while about 33 per cent prefer online options they can use on their own time.

Leaders who actually know what to do when someone’s struggling. Not just “go see HR”, but real, early support from people who’ve had training.

Rather than pointing people to the EAP once they’re overwhelmed, maybe it’s time to redesign the roles that are pushing them there in the first place.

They want to know they’re not alone. That their experience is valid. That help is available without judgement and without waiting until it gets worse.

Where to from here?

If we want to reduce burnout, improve retention, and build mentally healthier workplaces, we need to rethink how we talk about – and deliver – support.

Your EAP can be part of that solution – but only if employees actually use it.

Suzi Evans is an experienced mental health and mental fitness educator and trainer, the author of Grief, and the creator of Workbench for the Mind.