What Is an EAP (Employee Assistance Program)? How Private Is It?

An EAP is a free benefit that helps you address issues that affect your work performance and personal well-being. It’s a little bit like having a coach. Just like a good coach can help athletes do better on the field, an EAP counselor can help you be a more effective member of your team at work.

This doesn’t mean that an EAP is strictly limited to helping you with issues that arise on the job. Everything in your life affects your ability to work, and an EAP can help you with issues going on at home, too. Their main purpose is to give you mental health help, but many also provide services that can help you solve practical, financial, legal, and social problems.

The goal of any service an EAP offers is to give you the help you need to be able to do your job well. Your employer hopes you’ll use your EAP to get help with tricky issues that might otherwise cause you to perform poorly at work, miss days, or even have to quit.

Providing an EAP costs your employer way less than having to hire and train new workers. It’s a small gesture that can help them retain good workers by getting them the help they need. It is, ultimately, self-serving for the company to have one, but not because they want or need to use it to spy on you. They just hope it will keep you happier and more productive than you might be without it.

An EAP primarily helps you by providing you with free counseling sessions. These sessions are voluntary, confidential, and focused on helping you resolve a specific issue at home or work.

Most of the time, EAPs provide short-term, targeted counseling sessions but not long-term, free-form therapy. So, they are not a replacement for traditional therapy if you’re wanting to work through deeper or longer-standing issues. However, they can be a nice complement to it, or a first step toward getting it. Most EAPs will provide referrals to trusted local providers if you want or need longer-term therapy.

In rare cases, employers may refer you to an EAP to address a personal or performance issue at work. For example, your boss might refer you for “mandatory sessions” if you fail a random drug test.

However, there are tricky legal issues around whether employers can actually make you attend the EAP. In many cases, if they ask, it’s an easy choice to attend a free service that could save your job or repair your relationship with your boss. Ultimately, though, it’s up to you.

There are two main types of EAPs: on-site and off-site. (Some EAPs are a hybrid of these two types.)

In an on-site EAP, the counselors and other EAP staff are employees of your company. They have an office in one of your company buildings. 

In an off-site EAP, your employer contracts with outside professionals to provide EAP services. These professionals accept referrals from your company and provide EAP services from another location in the community. (In the case of mental health services, that location is usually a private practice office or a community mental health agency.)

Most companies use off-site EAPs. But in either case, the process of getting EAP services is usually pretty simple.

It’s important to know that in most cases, the services you get from an EAP will be completely free.

There may be time limits to certain services—for example, you may only be allowed a 30-minute consult with a lawyer or a limited number of sessions with a counselor.

But anything within the limits outlined in your EAP documents should be free. That’s just how EAPs are set up: they’re meant to be easy and relatively painless to use.

Most EAPs only offer short-term therapy or counseling. The number of sessions they provide varies from EAP to EAP. Some offer as few as three sessions, while others offer as many as 8 to 12. Based on our research, the average number of EAP sessions seems to be about five.

However, while there may be a limit on how many sessions you can get within a certain period of time, there usually isn’t a lifetime or even an annual limit on the number of sessions you can get. The number of sessions allotted by an EAP is usually per issue.

For example, let’s say your EAP offers five sessions per issue, and you use five sessions to get help navigating a workplace conflict. If six months later, you need help with personal financial stress, you should be able to get another five sessions to address that.

In your first session, expect your EAP therapist to ask a series of questions that will help them identify the problem you want to solve. Then expect them to immediately start working with you to solve it.

Your EAP counselor will help you identify your goals, figure out your strengths, recall what’s helped you before in similar situations, and identify shifts in thinking or perspective that might help you come up with a solution—all while providing the emotional support you need to tackle this problem.

It can be confusing and stressful to try to figure out who can receive information about your EAP sessions.

You may worry your employer could take action against you if you admit to substance use, severe mental health issues, or other factors affecting your work during an EAP session.

You may wonder if the therapist is truly working for you, the client. Anxiety around these issues may lead you to decide not to use your EAP at all. In fact, concerns about confidentiality are a major reason many people choose not to go to an EAP.

This is a shame, because in most cases, this anxiety is unwarranted. Therapists working for EAPs are required to uphold the same standards of confidentiality and privacy as all other therapists.

Providing services through an EAP doesn’t change the legal and ethical standards they must follow to maintain their licenses and uphold professional laws protecting client privacy. According to these laws, there are only a few exceptions to confidentiality.

Employee assistance programs are set up to provide as much anonymity as possible. Your name isn’t filed or sent to your employer if you call the helpline or attend a session.

When your employer checks to see how much employees are using the EAP, they just look at a report of the numbers of people going, not their names or any identifying information.

So, most of the time, no one will know you’re going. In most cases, if anyone finds out, it’s because you told them or because of one of a few exceptions to confidentiality.

None of these exceptions should take you by surprise—your employer and therapist are supposed to notify you of these exceptions before you even begin.

Otherwise, any breach of confidentiality in an EAP would be incidental or accidental. For example, if your company uses an on-site EAP, there could be a risk of co-workers seeing you walk into the EAP office and gossiping about it.

And while EAPs do not send the names or employee numbers of EAP participants to executives or HR, they do send out utilization reports that indicate the location and job level of people who are using the EAP. This is done only to let management know how the service is being used and whether they might need to expand or reduce it at certain locations.

In large companies, it’s unlikely this would reveal your identity. However, in small companies, your location and job level might be enough for HR or managers to figure out who you are.

Still, even if they guess it’s you, they’re not supposed to do anything with that information.

The reason your employer pays for an EAP in the first place is in the hope that employees will use it to get the help they need. They want you to use it so you can do a better job. They don’t want to make it risky, embarrassing, or difficult to go to an EAP. They don’t want to pay for a service no one uses.

If your job is toxic or your managers are unethical, you might have valid reasons to worry. However, it’s hard to find a way to use someone’s EAP use against them, and if they ever even tried, they’d risk losing their own jobs—or worse. Using confidential health information against employees could get them or the company in serious trouble.

You might be surprised by how much an EAP can help and how many problems you can solve within the number of sessions you’re given. Even when you can’t resolve an issue within those sessions, your EAP therapist can often still help you assess your situation and give you a good referral.

In fact, one of your EAP counselor’s jobs is to quickly figure out whether they can help you within the allotted time or whether they need to refer you out. In many cases, they can help you. A few sessions may be all you need to make an important decision, resolve a conflict, or overcome anxiety around a specific issue.

Another way to think about an EAP is that it gives you a safe place to explore an issue and see where you want to go with it next. It can be a way of dipping your toe into therapy if you’ve never tried it before and want to see what it’s all about. Given that it’s free and renews annually (if not each time a new issue comes up), there’s not much risk in giving it a try.

Another potential perk of using an EAP is fast service. The turnaround time between requesting an appointment and getting one can be faster through an EAP than when you’re trying to find a private practice therapist on your own. So, it can be a great way to get immediate help to address an issue that needs your attention right away.

Whether you can continue seeing your EAP therapist on your own after you’ve used up your EAP sessions mostly depends on whether your company has an on-site or off-site EAP program.

In most cases, with an off-site program (which most EAPs are), you should be able to keep seeing your EAP therapist. You’ll just need to figure out whether that therapist accepts your insurance and, if not, whether you can afford their standard rate.

In an on-site program, your therapist is just as much an employee of your company as you are. The terms of their employment probably don’t allow them to provide anything other than EAP sessions or to accept direct pay from you.

However, it’s always worth asking, as policies can vary from company to company. Many companies have hybrid EAPs that are staffed by a mix of on-site and off-site staff, and some counselors may be contractors that can continue seeing you off-site.

Employee assistance programs can be surprisingly useful. They can give you just the assistance you need to solve a specific problem that’s come up at home or at work.

They can help you develop an action plan and decide on your next steps. And even when you need longer-term treatment, they can help you find a provider that’s right for you.

The services you get from an EAP are nearly always free—and are always confidential. Your employer wants you to use your EAP so you’re at your best at work, not so they can spy on you. The therapists who work for EAPs must abide by the same confidentiality requirements as any other therapist, and they take protecting your personal information seriously.

But as helpful as EAPs can be, they won’t always be what you need, especially if you’re wanting to address an issue that may take a while to address.

They’re not a good place to look for long-term therapy for personal growth. They’re not where you want to go to explore the meaning of your dreams or seek answers to existential questions. Nor should you expect to completely resolve long-term or complicated mental health issues by going to an EAP.

So, if you know you want or need long-term therapy, and you can find a therapist in the community that you can afford to see, you may want to start there.

However, if you’re not completely sure what you need, an EAP counselor can help you figure that out and take your first steps toward addressing the issue.

Most companies choose to offer them because they can improve a lot of employee outcomes for not a lot of money. Their purpose is to help you stay in your job and do well at it. The fringe benefit for you is that the way EAPs do that is by helping you improve your overall well-being.

So, if you need help with an issue that’s come up at work or home, we encourage you to call your EAP’s confidential helpline or request a session through your company intranet. The help you need might be closer than you think.

Note: The original version of this article was written by Eric Patterson. This version has been updated, edited, and expanded by Stephanie Hairston.