Think “young people and alcohol” and an image of binge drinking at campus bars may quickly come to mind. But college students are not the only young people who engage in risky drinking. Their counterparts in the working world may also find themselves mired in drinking habits that put themselves and others in harm’s way.

Ensuring Solutions to Alcohol Problems recently participated in an innovative program to extend a hand to young employees who drink unhealthily.

“Late adolescence and early adulthood are critical risk periods for the onset of problems with alcohol and other drugs and the progression into alcohol and drug use and dependency,” notes Delia Olufokunbi, Ensuring Solutions chief operating officer. Yet surveys demonstrate that young adults don’t start getting treatment until six years after they first needed help. Sadly, treatment earlier in the trajectory of drinking problems could avert the most serious alcohol-related health problems.

The drinking issues of 18- to 24-year-old employees can easily spill into the workplace – leading to injuries, high rates of hospital and emergency room use, conflict on the job and reduced productivity. What’s more, binge or heavy drinking at this age can lead to alcoholism, a costly drain on an employers’ healthcare budget. Two-fifths of young working people in this age group engage in binge drinking, the federal government has found, and nearly a fifth are heavy drinkers.

As with any age group, the drinking problems of young adults, or Gen Yers, rarely surface on their own. They often show up with companions - other mental health issues (sometimes described as “stress”), financial crises and strained personal relationships. Sometimes people with such difficulties turn to workplace employee assistance programs (EAPs) to address problems at home. Effective EAPs can be helpful in addressing the underlying issue – risky or hazardous use of alcohol or illicit substances. Researchers and mental health professionals know, however, that Gen Yers don’t take advantage of these programs as much as they might. Leaders in the EAP field realize that encouraging employees to seek help may require different approaches for different age groups.

With this in mind, ValueOptions, the nation’s second largest managed behavioral care organization, teamed up with several partners, including Ensuring Solutions, to design and test strategies to make EAPs more effective for younger workers.  

“We knew there were marketing strategies used in the private sector that might be applicable to behavioral health,” said Kathy Greco, an employee assistance expert in charge of developing new workplace-based programs for ValueOptions customers. Greco added that they realized, for instance, that national beer companies win customers by appealing to young people’s desire to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex; relationships are among their primary concerns. Why not make the same appeal to promote EAP usage?

The project involved testing strategies with workers employed by 10 major corporations employing more than 55,000 young workers. The team learned that its objective - encouraging employers and employees to address alcohol problems – was closely tied to broader workplace challenges. Many employers are struggling to integrate the four generations that they employ and to bridge cultural and generational issues. ValueOptions created a program to help employers communicate more effectively with different age groups, thereby building more effective multigenerational work teams while encouraging employees to use the EAP to help with off-the-job problems. The program, “Engaging the Multigenerational Workforce,” uses a CD and online assistance, a handbook, calendar, posters and other resources. Examples of the posters are available for download at the end of this article.

The new tools “were created as a turnkey solution, easy for an organization to adapt and adopt,” Greco said, noting that although they have not been formally released, customers who got a sneak peek “have been exceptionally pleased and excited.”

The study that led to the development of “Engaging the Multigenerational Workforce” was funded by a grant from the federal Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. For more information, contact Ensuring Solutions.