0:02
I appreciate that, but you also reflected earlier on, you know, the sort of the impacts on the business owners and the, you know, the cost of them the financial pressures and these sorts of things. I’m not sure if that’s something that, you know, business owners, wheather they reach out directly to use the Eap program? Or, I guess more generally, I mean, what are you seeing as being the cost of these, you know, locked downs to business and what, what are you hearing from businesses and or people who are business owners using the services available?

0:37
We know that presenteeism and absenteeism alone are costing the economy billions of dollars a year. And through these lockdowns, there is certainly a higher degree of presenteeism, right? There’s more distractions in the home. But then when people’s mental health is being impacted, when there is news feeds, you know, it’s all negative news at the moment is very, you’d have to dig hard through the headlines to find something positive that’s happening in the world at the moment. So with that constant input of negative information, people are distracted. I myself are guilty of it after 11 it;s 11:04, after the call today, I know before 12 o’clock at some stage, my brain will go. Let’s check the numbers, right? How are we doing today? It’s gone up. So there’s a level of a high level of presenteeism that where there’s a high level of distraction, which is absolutely adding to business costs. There are more people recording, absent days, sick days. You know, I think some people manage it positively in terms of taking a mental health day and recognizing when they need it. Because if people aren’t taking these days, again, that’s what leads to that breakdown. But it’s great that someone’s taking a sick day or a mental health day to look after themselves, but that’s at a cost to the business as well. So EAP doesn’t only need to be around crisis support and looking after people when they’re broken, or when they’ve got symptoms and when they’re going through something EAP that’s the traditional use, but it’s shifting more towards health management. And if we can get more people reaching out to EAP at the moment and using it more from a health coaching perspective, getting advice, connecting with health professionals and looking at ways that they can enhance their well being improve their health have an outlet, that’s where employers will start to see quite a positive cost benefit as well. We know that if we can increase health if we can increase engagement that is going to have positive impacts on productivity and businesses.