94% of HR Leaders Won’t Call Their EAP a Success. Here’s Why.

In short: SHRM’s 2026 Mental Health Snapshot found that 55% of workers rarely or never use their organization’s mental health benefits, and that only 6% of HR professionals describe their own program’s utilization as “high.” Read that second number carefully, because it is not a utilization rate. 6% is the share of HR leaders who believe their program is actually working, which means 94 out of every 100 would not describe their own program that way. The problem in most organizations is not the absence of resources, at least in most cases. It is that the resources are invisible, terribly slow, quietly distrusted, or coming from the wrong partner. Here is why that happens, and five things you can still change this year.

I have run a lot of miles and a lot of marathons, and I have coached a lot of runners through their first one. The mistake I see most often has nothing to do with fitness.

Somewhere around mile 18, a runner tells me they hit the wall. We go back through the race and I find out they ran past three aid stations because the volunteers were on the left, they were trapped along the right side of the pack, and grabbing a cup felt like too much trouble at the time. The support was there. Funded, staffed, and stocked. It just was not reachable in the two seconds they had to decide.

That is the exact shape of the workplace mental health problem in 2026.

The majority of HR Directors I talk to have some type of mental health resources in place, usually an Employee Assistance Program. Only about half of them can name their vendor. Many fought for the budget line. And then the numbers come back and it turns out the aid station was on the wrong side of the road.

The number that should stop you

SHRM surveyed more than 1,000 HR professionals and more than 1,100 U.S. workers in February 2026. Two findings sit right next to each other and tell the whole story: 55% of workers said they rarely or never use their organization’s mental health benefits, and only 6% of HR professionals reported “high” utilization of those benefits (SHRM).

Six percent.

That is not a communications hiccup. That is a benefit that exists in the employee handbook and almost nowhere else.

Pay close attention to what that number is, though, because it gets misread quite often. Six percent, in this instance, is not a utilization rate. It is the share of HR professionals willing to describe their own program’s utilization as “high.”

And nobody has defined what “high” even means. There is no agreed standard, so every person answering that survey graded on their own curve. In my experience, the evidence suggests that national EAP counseling utilization sits somewhere around three to four percent of employees in a given year. If that is the baseline, then “high” has almost come to mean subjectively “low.”

That is the perception problem I want to go after here. It is not that your utilization numbers are necessarily low. It is that an entire category has somewhat agreed to grade itself against a failing standard, and that agreement is costing people help they need. If your program is at nine percent, you are well above average and you should be extremely proud of the work that took. At the same time, you should also refuse to believe that nine is the ceiling.

It gets more interesting. The same research found HR professionals’ confidence in their own preparedness to support employee mental health fell from 70% in 2024 to 62% in 2026, and that investment is unlikely to increase (SHRM). Nationally, the share of employers offering mental health benefits at all dropped to 82% in 2026, down six points in one year and nine since 2022 (HR Dive).

The need is up, but confidence is down, and budgets are flat in many cases. That leaves us with two options, and I want to address both, because I watch HR teams assume only the first one exists.

The first is to make the program you already have actually work better, because a large part of what drives utilization sometimes costs nothing extra.

The second is to replace it, and it is far less painful than people assume. Not all EAPs are created equal. There is no rule that you have to wait for open enrollment to solve for your EAP benefit. You can change partners anytime throughout the year. Sometimes you owe your current provider a notice period, and sometimes the EAP you have was thrown in free alongside your disability plan, in which case you can add a modern one now and stop pretending the free one checks the box.

Four honest reasons good benefits go unused

1. Nobody was ever taught how to use it. Only about one in three employees, 32%, have received training from their employer about mental health resources (NAMI/Ipsos). An announcement at onboarding two years ago is not training. It is trivia. This is fixable, and it should not land on your plate alone.

When we bring on a new Lifestyle EAP client, we run a live kickoff for the whole organization, virtually or in person or both, then annual refreshers company wide, then we re-teach how and when to use the program in a monthly member newsletter all year. If your provider handed you a flyer and a login page and called it implementation, that is not education. That is paperwork, and your current utilization numbers are likely telling you so. One of the most important things we do at Covenant is not just landing a new client and getting things kicked off. It is the month after, and the month after that, and the month after that. Set it and forget it is how an organization ends up with zero utilization across the board. Our clients lean on us for partnership consistently, and that is exactly the relationship we want.

2. They do not believe it is private. Nearly half of employees, 48%, worry they would be judged for sharing mental health struggles at work. Only 39% are comfortable discussing mental health with HR, and just 30% with senior leadership. Only 15% have ever told a manager their mental health was suffering because of work (NAMI/Ipsos). Read that last number again, then ask what your incident reports are actually capturing.

Employees need to hear on day one exactly how confidentiality works. No identifiable information goes back to the employer, and the only exceptions are the narrow legal ones every clinician operates under, such as imminent risk of harm or a court order. Saying it that plainly earns far more trust than promising the impossible.

3. The front door is too slow. Because I live in Iowa, I know that Iowa employers get hit harder than most. Eighty-one Iowa counties have a shortage of mental health care providers (Iowa HHS), and the state meets roughly 19.5% of its designated need (KFF). The shortage is national, not just an Iowa problem. An employee who finally works up the nerve to reach out and then gets a six-week wait does not reschedule. They give up, and they do not try again for a long time.

There is also a structural reason, and it is worth understanding before your next EAP renewal. Every EAP pays its providers a negotiated rate per session. Ours does, and so does the cheapest program on the market. That means every session an employee actually uses is a real cost on the provider’s ledger. Now look at the pricing. Traditional EAPs are often priced per employee per month at a number so small it looks like a rounding error, and some are bundled in free alongside another line of coverage. When the revenue per employee is that thin, session volume is the one thing that can break the math. I am not going to accuse anyone of deliberately throttling how quickly members can get in for appointments. I don’t need to. Just follow the arithmetic and it becomes clearer as to why the industry average has been stuck where it is for decades, and why so many people have come to accept that waiting weeks and weeks to be seen is simply how this works. It is not how it has to work, but it does have a price. We do cost more than a free EAP, and that is by design. Our value-based pricing is built on the assumption that people are actually going to use the program, because speed in scheduling and speed to being seen are not luxuries. They are the product, and they should always be a top priority. You largely get what you pay for in this category, and a benefit nobody can reach is not a bargain at any price.

4. Managers are running on empty too. Only 20% of employees globally were engaged in 2025, the lowest since 2020, and manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% in one year (Gallup). For the first time in Gallup’s tracking, more U.S. workers are struggling than thriving (Gallup). The person you count on to notice warning signs is frequently the person with the most warning signs.

Five things you can change this year

None of these require a very heavy lift. Most require an afternoon or two and a willingness to see the real number.

1. Evaluate metrics that actually describe engagement. For starters, let’s agree to discontinue reporting time from first contact to first appointment, which still shows up far too on many RFPs and fails to illustrate how things are actually working. Here is why, from our side of the phone. We can often get a member into a virtual session inside 24 hours. Then the member says they would rather be seen in person, which is great, so we find a clinic near them with an opening in, let’s say, three days. Then they tell us they would prefer a therapist of a different sex than the one available in three days, with a specific area of focus, so we secure a different one, and now we are looking at sometime mid-to-late next week perhaps. Nothing in that sequence is a failure. Every step was us honoring what that person truly wanted, and yet the clock ran the whole time. The goal here is to create the best available blend of speed and therapist match, and no stopwatch measures that. Track these instead: unique individuals who received counseling, unique individuals working with a life coach, calls to the 24/7 line, unique individuals with active member portal accounts, members completing self-help courses, those accessing legal consultations or eldercare and childcare support services, etc. Count people and count breadth of use. That is a picture your leadership team can read.

2. Try it for yourself. Today, call from your personal phone. Count the menu prompts. Note whether you reach an actual human, and whether you walk away with an appointment or just another phone number to try. Did you have to leave a voicemail? If so, how long until somebody called back? Can you engage with the scheduling team online through a dedicated member portal as an alternative? Point being, whatever you experienced, your most anxious employee will experience it worse. One caveat, offered honestly, since I obviously run one of these organizations. No EAP partner bats a thousand. Somebody somewhere will have a bad call on a bad day. What you are testing for is not perfection. It is whether the system was built for the person in distress or for the vendor’s convenience, and whether your partner owns a miss and makes things better with some urgency.

3. Train managers to refer, not to counsel. Managers do not need clinical skills, they simply need to be trusted facilitators. They need one or two sentences they can say without freezing, and they need to know exactly where to confidently send someone. Employees at companies that offer mental health training report greater perceived support and less concern about stigma (NAMI/Ipsos). It is why we built our ‘EAP for Managers 101’ session. Forty-five minutes of practice beats a policy binder every time.

4. Communicate at least twelve times a year, not once. One open enrollment mention is a whisper. Build a rhythm: a monthly resource spotlight, a real story when you have permission to share it, a quarterly reminder from a senior leader who says out loud that they have used a resource themselves. Repetition is not nagging. It is permission. I do want to emphasize that the more these communications can come from the C-suite and senior leadership (in addition to other parts of the organization), the bigger the impact will be on reducing stigma throughout your organization.

5. Answer the confidentiality question before anyone asks it. In writing, in plain language, in every communication. Who sees what. What your organization does and does not receive. What happens if a manager makes a formal referral. Silence here reads as risk, and employees will typically assume the worst.

The greatest stories never told

There is a hard truth about prevention work. It is invisible when it succeeds.

Nobody sends a thank you note for the resignation letter that never got written, the leave that never got filed, or the team that never had to hold a memorial. The Workplace Outcome Suite annual report estimates a return of $5.11 for every dollar invested in an EAP across all services, not just counseling (Workplace Outcome Suite Annual Report), and research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine puts the annual cost of burnout between roughly $4,000 per hourly employee and $20,683 per executive (Johns Hopkins). Those numbers still undersell it, because the biggest wins never show up on a report at all.

Somewhere in your organization right now is a person who is going to have the worst month of their life this year. Whether that becomes a story told at a leadership retreat or a story nobody ever has to tell depends almost entirely on whether help was close enough to reach in the two seconds they were willing to reach for it.

What we control is how fast we respond, how hard we work to get somebody in the door, and how relentlessly we remind people that the aid station is right there and it is theirs.

So, pull your utilization numbers for this year and sit with these three questions (if you can’t get access to your organization’s utilization numbers, that is another red flag). What is the story that explains the numbers you are currently looking at? What is possible here, not just industry average, but truly possible? And what would we have to change to get us there?

If your answer to question three is that your current EAP setup isn’t likely to get you moving in the right direction, changing it is much simpler than most people expect. You do not have to rebuild your entire benefits stack, and in most cases it comes down to a notice period and a kickoff date. We handle the rest.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. If you or someone you work with is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text at 988, or by chat at 988lifeline.org.

Partner with Covenant Workplace Solutions

Sustaining mental health and well-being initiatives year-round requires commitment, resources, and the right expertise. At Covenant Workplace Solutions, we’re here to help you create a mentally healthy workplace that drives engagement, high-performance, and employee retention. Our comprehensive Lifestyle EAP offers tailored solutions to meet your organization’s unique needs – a program for all employees, every single day, not only those who may be struggling.

An EAP partner you can count on:

• Built for speed.
• Built to be proactive.
• Built for real utilization.

If your organization is ready to take your mental health and wellness strategy to the next level, look no further. Contact us today to learn how we can support your vision for a healthier, higher-performing workforce!