Impact

Your organization pays for an employee assistance program. Most of your employees will never use it. Research from Mental Health Research Canada shows only 33% of Canadians report access to an EAP through work or a household member. Among those with coverage, one in ten would turn to the EAP first for mental health support.

The gap between what an EAP promises and what employees receive costs you twice. You pay the invoice. Your people miss timely care. This guide shows you how to close the gap.

What an EAP Covers

An EAP is a confidential, short-term counselling service for employees whose personal difficulties affect their wellbeing and work performance. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety outlines the typical scope:

• Job stress and burnout
• Relationship difficulties
• Eldercare, childcare, and parenting challenges
• Substance use
• Financial or legal problems
• Family violence

Employees access these services free of charge, without a referral, and without their manager’s knowledge. On paper, the model looks strong. The usage numbers tell a different story.

The Utilization Problem

Mental Health Research Canada surveyed 3,217 Canadians about EAP access and use. The findings deserve your attention:

• Only 33% of Canadians report access to an EAP.
• Only 60% correctly identify what an EAP does. Four in ten hold a vague or wrong idea of its purpose.
• Among employees who would not contact their EAP first, 35% cite low awareness or understanding.
• 25% doubt the program’s effectiveness. Another 23% fear a confidentiality breach.
• Only 10% of covered Canadians would reach out to their EAP first for mental health support.

Canadian utilization studies report annual usage rates near 10%. You fund a service for your entire workforce. Ten people out of a hundred pick up the phone. Ask yourself: would your newest hire know how to reach your EAP today?

Why Employees Skip the EAP

Four barriers keep usage low:

• Invisibility. The EAP appears once during onboarding, then disappears into the benefits binder.
• Stigma. Employees fear judgment for seeking help, so they stay silent.
• Distrust. People worry their employer learns who called and why.
• Poor first experiences. Long wait times and mismatched counsellors turn first-time users into skeptics.

Notice the pattern. Three of the four barriers live inside your culture, not inside the provider’s contract. A better vendor fixes wait times. Only you fix invisibility, stigma, and distrust.

Six Moves to Raise EAP Use

Small, consistent actions outperform a single awareness campaign. Start with these six:

1. Promote the program year-round. One mention at onboarding fails. Put the EAP number in email signatures, intranet banners, and team meetings.
2. Train your leaders to refer with confidence. A manager who notices early signs of distress becomes your strongest referral channel.
3. Build a network of trained peer supporters. Employees trust colleagues before they trust a hotline.
4. Publish confidentiality rules in plain language. Spell out what your provider reports to you: aggregate usage numbers, never names.
5. Share utilization data with your workforce. A message like “140 of your colleagues used the EAP last year” normalizes the service faster than any poster.
6. Hold your provider accountable. Ask about speed to first appointment, counsellor credentials, and session limits per issue.

Where Training Fits

An EAP works as a destination. Someone still needs to point the way. The Working Mind gives people leaders practical tools to notice declining mental health, start a supportive conversation, and guide team members toward help without judgment. Mental Health First Aid prepares designated employees to respond to a colleague in distress and connect them to professional care, including your EAP. Both programs come from the Mental Health Commission of Canada and multiply the return on the benefits you already fund.

Measure What Matters

Track four numbers every quarter:

• Utilization rate: the percentage of eligible employees who used the service.
• Awareness: the percentage of staff who name the EAP as a support option in your annual survey.
• Speed: average days between first contact and first session.
• Return use: the percentage of users who come back for more sessions.

Set a target and review it with your leadership team. Programs with ongoing promotion and visible leadership support post higher usage rates. Aim for 15% utilization within two years. Report these numbers alongside absenteeism and turnover. Together they build the case for your next investment in workplace mental health.

The Bottom Line

Your EAP is a contract. Your culture decides whether anyone uses it. Promote the service, train your leaders, and measure the results. What would change in your workplace if EAP usage doubled next year?

Written by Lauren Cleveland, Specialist, Facilitator Experience

Many coaches want to support mental health. They see the signs and indicators. They care about their athletes. They understand that performance isn’t just physical, it is also mental. But when it comes time to start the conversation, there’s often hesitation.

• What do I say?
• What if I say the wrong thing?
• How can I support? What is my role when it comes to support?

These are the kinds of questions that we heard in our The Working Mind Workshop with Kicking the Stigma and the Indianapolis Colts.

And they’re important questions. Because when coaches feel equipped and are willing open the conversation, we know that is when athletes feel comfortable to share.

Moving From Silence to Conversation

In many sport environments, mental health tends to be something that stays in the background, not because coaches don’t care, but because they aren’t sure how to start that conversation; whether that be language, confidence, or shared understanding to be able to talk about it.

In this workshop, we saw this play out early on:

• Coaches are engaged, but cautious
• They were curious, but unsure how this fits into their role
• They’re thinking about their athletes, their own experiences, and the dynamics of parents

As the session unfolded, we witnessed the hesitation subside and curiosity take the place of uncertainty.

What Changed in the Room

One of the most consistent things we observed this the shift from uncertainty to openness.

Coaches began to:

• Recognize mental health as part of overall performance and wellbeing, and see where they can create space for dialogue around mental health
• Acknowledge that they don’t need to be experts to make a difference
• Understand that small, everyday interactions matter

We asked coaches to share: What is one thing that you are taking away from this workshop?

Here are few of their responses:

“I need to make mental health conversations more intentional” – 2026 participant

“Mental health is just as important as physical health, and coaches play a key role in reducing stigma and supporting student-athletes. Small conversations and genuine connections can make a significant difference in an athlete’s willingness to seek support.” – 2026 participant

“Strategies to implement sessions during practices to create safe spaces and opportunities to communicate about their overall well-being.” – 2026 participant

There were often moments where the room got quiet, not due to disengaged, but in reflection.

This is usually when we can see the wheels turning and we get to witness the information landing.

Because this isn’t just about information, it’s about permission.

Permission to notice.
Permission to check in.
Permission to have conversations that might be uncomfortable, but necessary.

It’s Not About Having the All the Answers

A key insight that often resonates:

Coaches don’t need to have all the answers they just need a place to start.

“The biggest takeaway for me is that coaches can positively impact mental health by listening, showing empathy, and knowing when to connect athletes with additional resources.” – 2026 participant

Many coaches come in expecting they’ll need scripts or perfect phrasing. What they leave with instead is something more practical:

• A way to recognize when someone might be struggling
• Language to open a conversation
• Confidence to listen without trying to fix everything

It’s a shift from the pressure to be “the expert” to confidence in being present and supportive.

Small Actions, Meaningful Impact

When coaches open up and talk about mental health, the impact isn’t always immediate or obvious, but it’s meaningful.

It can look like:

• An athlete feeling supported to speak up
• A team culture where check-ins become normal
• A conversation happening earlier, rather than later

Over time, these small actions build something bigger: trust, connection, and psychological safety within the team.

What This Means for Sport Environments

Leaders carry a disproportionate share of workplace stress. They also carry a disproportionate influence When coaches feel equipped to engage in mental health conversations:

• Silence is replaced with openness
• Uncertainty is replaced with confidence
• Support becomes part of everyday coaching

And more importantly, coaches often feel less alone in navigating these moments.

A Starting Point

Not every conversation will feel easy. Not every moment will be clear.

But the goal isn’t perfection, it’s progress.

If there’s one takeaway we see consistently, it’s this:

“I think a big takeaway is that several of the coaches in attendance came back for a second year. Also, that while the training/education is critical, the conversations within the tables are really what sets this event apart.” – Brett Kramer, Director of Kicking the Stigma

When coaches open up, even in small ways, it creates space for others to do the same.

What Is Resilience Training — and Why Does It Matter?

Resilience training teaches employees skills to adapt, recover, and stay effective when work gets hard. It is not about teaching people to endure bad conditions. It is about building the capacity to respond well under pressure — and to bounce back faster when things go wrong.

In any given week, 500,000 Canadians miss work due to a psychological health issue. Mental health problems cost Canadian employers more than $6 billion in lost productivity annually from absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. Those numbers do not come from isolated crises. They come from chronic, everyday wear — unmanaged stress, poor coping skills, and workplaces that do not build people up.

Resilience training is one evidence-based response to that problem. But not all programs deliver the same results. Here is what the research says about what works — and what does not.

The Evidence Behind Resilience Training

Resilience is a skill. It is not a personality trait some people have and others do not. Research consistently shows it develops with the right training and environment.

A review of eight diverse workplace resilience programs found an average effect size of 0.50 for increased resilience across participants. That is a meaningful, consistent result. Programs that combine cognitive skills training, peer support, and manager involvement show the strongest outcomes.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada has also found that offering mental health training to managers is a predictor of below-average absenteeism related to long-term mental illness. The investment pays off at the team level, not just the individual level.

And yet 70% of Canadian businesses have no workplace mental health strategy. The gap between evidence and action is wide.

What Effective Resilience Training Looks Like

Effective programs share common elements. They do not rely on a single workshop or a one-size-fits-all approach.

• Cognitive reframing skills: Teaching employees to recognize and shift unhelpful thinking patterns. This is one of the most studied and replicated elements of resilience-building programs.
• Emotional regulation tools: Skills for managing stress responses in the moment — breathing techniques, grounding exercises, and awareness of physical stress signals.
• Social support structures: Programs that build peer connection and psychological safety in teams outperform those focused only on individual skills. Resilience is not built in isolation.
• Manager training: When leaders model resilient behaviours and respond well to employee distress, the whole team benefits. Manager involvement is a consistent predictor of program success.
• Follow-through and reinforcement: One-day events rarely hold. Programs with ongoing check-ins, refreshers, or practice sessions produce lasting change.

Does your organization have any of these in place? If the answer is no, you are not alone in that gap — but you have options to close it.

What Does Not Work

Resilience training fails when it becomes a substitute for addressing the root causes of workplace stress. You do not build a resilient workforce by telling stressed employees to meditate while leaving toxic workloads or poor leadership in place.

Programs that do not work tend to share these features:

• A one-time workshop with no follow-up
• Generic content not adapted to the organization’s culture or industry
• Individual focus only — ignoring team dynamics or management behaviour
• No leadership buy-in or visible support from senior staff
• Framing resilience as a personal responsibility while ignoring systemic workplace factors

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety emphasizes that psychological health in the workplace requires both individual support and organizational change. Resilience training is a tool — not a complete solution on its own.

Resilience and Mental Health: They Are Connected

Resilience is not the same as mental health — but they are closely linked. Employees with stronger resilience skills tend to experience lower rates of burnout, anxiety, and depression. They recover faster after setbacks. They are better at asking for help when they need it.

That matters in a workplace context. Over half of Canadian employees say they faced mental health challenges that affected their work in the past year — but only one in three disclosed it to anyone at work. Fear of stigma keeps people silent. Resilience training that is delivered in a psychologically safe environment helps reduce that stigma and opens the door to earlier support-seeking.

This is where programs like The Working Mind (TWM) play a direct role. TWM is an evidence-based mental health training program developed to shift how people think, feel, and act about mental health at work. It is specifically designed for the workplace context — and it builds the awareness and skills that underpin resilient teams.

Resilience Training for Leaders: A Specific Case

Leaders carry a disproportionate share of workplace stress. They also carry a disproportionate influence on team culture. When a leader is depleted, burned out, or poorly equipped to manage their own responses, it ripples outward.

Resilience training for leaders serves a dual purpose. It supports the leader as an individual. It also equips them to notice signs of distress in their teams — and respond in ways that help rather than harm.

Consider these questions:

• Do your managers know how to have a supportive conversation with an employee who is struggling?
• Do they know when to refer someone to professional support?
• Do they model healthy behaviours around workload, recovery, and seeking help?

If those skills are missing, resilience training is an investment with a high return. Programs like Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) equip leaders and employees alike with practical skills to recognize and respond to mental health concerns — including the early signs of distress that often precede longer-term illness.

How to Evaluate Resilience Training Programs

Not every program on the market is evidence-based. Before you invest in training for your team, ask these questions:

• What is the evidence base? Has the program been evaluated in peer-reviewed research, or is it based on general wellness content?
• Who delivers it? Are facilitators trained in mental health, organizational psychology, or a related field?
• Does it address team and organizational factors? Individual skill-building alone is insufficient.
• Is there post-training support? Learning should be reinforced over time, not delivered once and forgotten.
• Does it align with Canadian workplace standards? Programs that align with the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety provide a recognized framework for implementation.

A Return Worth Tracking

Research shows a return of $1.62 for every $1 invested in workplace mental health programs. Resilience training contributes to that return when it is implemented well — by reducing absenteeism, improving team cohesion, and lowering turnover.

But the return is not just financial. A workforce with stronger resilience skills is better equipped for change, better at supporting each other, and more likely to stay engaged through difficult periods.

What is the cost of not investing in resilience? Look at your absenteeism data, your turnover rates, and your disability claims. The answer is likely already there.

Where to Start

If your organization is ready to take the first step, start with training that is built for the workplace — evidence-based, facilitated by skilled trainers, and designed to create lasting behaviour change.

Opening Minds offers programs grounded in this approach. The Working Mind and Mental Health First Aid are two structured paths toward building the skills your team needs — not just to cope, but to grow.

Resilience is learnable. The question is whether your organization makes learning it a priority.