Maximising your mental health offers: encouraging Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs)

Background

On 3rd July 2025, Healthy Dialogues delivered a webinar on Maximising Your Mental Health Offers, providing guidance for HR professionals and team leaders on how to have effective conversations and how to raise awareness to better encourage uptake of Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs).

This webinar was coordinated by Thrive LDN, London’s public health partnership, with support and funding from the Greater London Authority’s health team in partnership with The Mayor’s Good Work Standard.

About The Good Work Standard

The Good Work Standard is a free accreditation programme that provides employers with a set of best employment practices alongside information and resources to help achieve them.

As part of this standard, looking after the health and wellbeing of employees is key. Organisations may do this by offering benefits such as EAPs and other mental health offers. Whilst there are many benefits of offering these programmes for both employers and employees, such as increased wellbeing and work productivity, uptake is often low.

If your organisation is interested in becoming accredited, please read their Guidance and Support for Employers, or contact the Good Work Standard team at fairness@london.gov.uk

About the webinar

The webinar provided attendees with the skills and knowledge to encourage uptake in EAPS and mental health offers, to support the health and wellbeing of employees, both generally and in line with the Good Work Standard.

The webinar was facilitated by Rebecca Maclean from Healthy Dialogues, who said: “It is important that we take the right approach to motivate people to engage with employee assistance programmes and other mental health offers – telling or pushing people to do something is often ineffective even if it is well-intentioned! This webinar was designed to give simple, clear, evidence-based strategies for promoting use of these offers to best support the health and wellbeing of employees.”

Webinar learning objectives

The learning objectives of the webinar were to:

• Understand what EAPs and mental health offers typically include and how they benefit staff
• Identify the barriers that prevent staff from using EAPs or disclosing their needs
• Reflect on your current approach to signposting and promoting wellbeing offers
• Learn how to confidently introduce and normalise mental health resources during 1:1s, team meetings, and return-to-work conversations
• Plan practical steps to increase awareness and trust in EAPs and other support offers
• Use the workbook to create a simple strategy for improving uptake in your teams or organisation

This webinar was recorded and can be watched below.

Webinar

Download webinar slides.

Further resources

Further to the webinar, an accompanying workbook can be downloaded.

Download the workbook

You can use this to guide your conversations with others about EAPs and plan opportunities to raise awareness.

For more information and resources about employee wellbeing, you can visit Good Thinking’s Employer’s Toolkit.