When Employee Relations Only Offers Training or EAP, It’s a Red Flag

Recently, I asked a simple question during a period of significant organisational uncertainty:

“What else are we offering employees during this unknown change period?”

The response from Employee Relations was:

• We could offer online change management training, or

• We could engage the EAP to deliver resilience training

And that response stopped me in my tracks (red flag).

Not because training is inherently bad. But because those answers reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of psychosocial risk — and an even more concerning lack of urgency.

Training Is Not a Control When the Hazard (red flag) Is the System

Let’s start with the idea of change management training.

Training assumes the problem is a skills gap. But during organisational uncertainty, the primary hazards are rarely about competence.

They are about:

• Lack of information

• Loss of control

• Fear of the unknown

• Job insecurity

• Inconsistent leadership messages

No online module fixes uncertainty. No course removes ambiguity created by delayed decisions. No training compensates for silence from leadership.

When the hazard is how change is being experienced, training the worker is not risk control — it is risk displacement.

Resilience Training: The Most Polite Way to Blame Employees

Then there’s the suggestion of EAP-delivered resilience training.

This is where the alarm bells really ring.

Resilience training sends a very specific message:

“The system is stressful — so you need to cope better.”

It subtly reframes systemic harm as an individual shortcoming.

Let’s be honest:

• People are not distressed because they lack resilience

• They are distressed because they are operating in prolonged uncertainty

• Because expectations haven’t changed, but conditions have

• Because leadership presence has reduced, not increased

Teaching people to “bounce back” while maintaining the same harmful conditions is not care. It’s normalising exposure.

What’s Missing: Hazard Identification and Control

What was notably absent from the conversation was any mention of:

• Identifying psychosocial hazards arising from the change

• Assessing the risk level of prolonged uncertainty

• Adjusting workloads or performance expectations

• Increasing leadership visibility and communication

• Monitoring psychosocial risk indicators in real time

Instead, the solutions offered were:

• Training

• Counselling-adjacent services

Both of which sit at the bottom of the hierarchy of controls.

This tells me the organisation is focused on interventions after distress, not prevention of harm.

This Isn’t About Capability — It’s About Care

What concerned me most was not the lack of options.

It was the lack of curiosity.

No one asked:

• What are people actually experiencing right now?

• Where is the uncertainty hurting the most?

• What decisions could reduce harm, even if they’re uncomfortable?

When organisations default to training and EAP, it’s often not because they don’t have better options.

It’s because:

• System-level controls require leadership courage

• They expose flaws in decision-making

• They force accountability for how change is designed

And that is much harder than commissioning a course.

What This Response Signals (Whether Intended or Not)

When Employee Relations responds this way, the message employees receive — even if unspoken — is:

What’s Offered	What Employees Hear
Online training	“Figure it out yourself”
Resilience training	“You’re the problem if you’re struggling”
EAP	“Support is available once you break”

That is not psychological safety. That is containment.

What Should Have Been on the Table

A genuinely psychosocially safe response would have included discussions about:

• How uncertainty is being communicated and managed

• Whether workloads and deadlines need temporary adjustment

• How leaders are being supported to have honest conversations

• How feedback from employees will be captured and acted on

• How long this level of uncertainty is acceptable

None of these require a training provider. They require leadership ownership.

The Bottom Line

When the only solutions offered during organisational uncertainty are:

• Training

• Resilience programs

• EAP

It’s not a wellbeing strategy. It’s a risk deflection strategy.

And that should alarm anyone who understands psychosocial hazards.

Because uncertainty is a known risk. And choosing not to control it is a decision — whether the organisation admits it or not.