An important part of FEI’s comprehensive approach to enhancing well-being is to provide a suite of training experiences for employees and leaders that educate, inform and strengthen their natural abilities.
In fact, there are multiple benefits to providing additional organizational trainings that emphasize comprehensive approaches to well-being: Improve skills, bolster morale, impart organizational culture, impact both job and customer satisfaction, stimulate creative thinking and more.
So, given all these recognized benefits, will your employees participate in training if offered the chance?
After all, employee assistance programs (EAPs) are ideally positioned to address behavioral health issues in the workplace and have become an essential component of wellness programs, recognizing that mental and emotional health are paramount to well-being. But there are as many barriers to accessing training as there are barriers to accessing EAP services. Possible reasons employees are prevented from utilizing these kinds of benefits include perceived stigma around seeking behavioral health services as well as wariness about confidentiality or lack of benefit awareness.
The common challenge of promoting EAP services may also exist when promoting training opportunities. How does your organization communicate the training to encourage participation? As with EAP, a mix of communication channels will result in reaching a broader range of employee groups:
- Use electronic options such as direct calendar invitations to employees and post the training schedule on your company’s Intranet.
- Create private Facebook or LinkedIn employee groups to communicate upcoming events and trainings via social media.
- Integrate EAP training with your wellness program and consider offering incentive points for attendance.
- Encourage early registration.
- Consider hardcopy options such as posters, flyers and newsletters.
- Try promoting the training during staff meetings
- Make the training a special event and provide refreshments.
Maintain a wellness perspective throughout your communications to promote any EAP service, including training. FEI’s trainings focus on the positive side of mental health as well as provide new perspectives on cultural experience.
Seeking help is a positive choice. Reinforcing this idea will not only encourage participation but also strengthen employees’ insight into how both EAP services and training opportunities can benefit them.