Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, our forum has almost gone through a whole day. All our guest speakers gave wonderful presentations, not only they showed brilliant manner, they provided tremendous amount of information. Dr. Daolong Zhang just mentioned that it can be a stressor to accept huge amount of new knowledge and information, so now I would like to show two short video clips to relax you a little bit.
    (A little bear want to swim in the sea, but he’s having a hard time since the changes of the seashore is very unpredictable.)
I think that’s probably our true feeling on developing EAP system in China, still unpredictable. I believe only when we truly understand the EAP market of China, we could be well prepared. The topic I would like to share today is the current situation of EAP in China.
    First from companies’ knowledge and usage, they mainly fall into following three categories: the first one is that a very tiny number of multinational companies are using international standard EAP, from the statistics we now have, this kind of companies may be 5% of the multinational companies in China. There are other companies, they become aware of the need for EAP, and take an active role in looking for suitable EAP providers. They get EAP mainly from two approaches: 1. holding some trainings or seminars about stress and stress management for their employees, 2. providing some tests for employees. Very few companies provide face-to-face counseling for employees by inviting counselors to their company weekly. This kind of EAP existed in China can be referred as Chinese style EAP. Since EAP is still in infant state in China, many things are special compared with others.
    This Chinese style EAP can be called partial EAP, or the beginning status of EAP. It can still help to solve some employees’ problems to some extent, however it’s very limited. Give an example, many employees may find that they can not work out their problems or confusions through a single training session. The training may help an employee to start to look at his worries or think about his stressors, or even help to find some stressors. What to do next? Without follow-up services, he will be lost. Tests have same problems. It’s like a patient being told he has cancer, but he can do nothing about it, he could only feel worse. Partial EAP is limited in terms of screening, confidentiality, continuous services and other issues.
    Now we believe that partial EAP has following limitations: first, the continuity and comprehensiveness will be affected; second, partial EAP does not include instant services; third, network service cross province cannot be developed; fourth, no systematic service data, which is very important for the company, can be generated and provided.
    From our analysis, some companies have begun in using EAP, partial EAP or standard EAP, but most companies, whether multinational corporation in China or local companies, have not used EAP by now. For the local companies, they may not know EAP enough. For those multinational companies, they may be still looking for standard EAP providers in China. This is the situation in China.
    What is the situation of counselors who are providing service to companies?We all know that the accreditation of counselors has begun since 2001, and we still lack EAP qualification in China. So there is a blank. We neither have introduced EAP counselor accreditation from EAPA, nor do we have parallel organization to grant counselors’ standard. Under such condition, counselors also fall into three categories: 1. they work for some EAP companies in China, but they have not received any training in EAP. Their main problem is that they don’t understand problem-focus short term counseling. Let’s look at this picture, we can see a worried father, he is worrying about feeding and schooling of his children. His need is not having someone discussing about the relation between his poverty and having too many children, but how to support his family now. If the counselor has not been trained for EAP, he would bring the counseling to a misled direction.
    Give another example, if an employee comes to the counselor to talk about his problem in communicating with his supervisor, the counselor who is not trained for EAP would suggest him to dig from his childhood, maybe like whether he has a problem with his parents or grandparents. The employee may find that he do have a problem with his grandparents since he was a little boy, but when he come to work, he still have no idea about how to talk with his supervisor. So problem focused counseling is more suitable in the case of company. 2 Another group is some counselors who have been trained in EAP counseling for very short time, like 2 or 3 days’ training from time to time. So these counselors do have some idea about problem-focused short term counseling, but the problem is the load of their counseling service is hardly matched with the time of supervision they need to have. Give a demonstration of metaphor, if we want to train a sharp shooter, we can not just let him shoot in games, therefore, how to provide professional training and supervision to EAP counselors in China is a problem we need to face.
    The third group, as professor Jia Xiaoming just talked about, is a group of counselors who neither work for EAP companies, nor have gained training in EAP. However, they do have very good psychological background, and are often invited by companies to give some training or counseling about stress or some acute problems coming up in companies. Unfortunately, these counselors are not familiarized with procedures of EAP, which limits them from providing EAP services in large scale.
    From the analysis above, we can see that EAP counselors in China are still in infant status, lacking systematic training and supervision. From this point, we have to admit that we need time to grow to become mature, but how long? Let’s review the history of EAP development in United States, you may look at your handout, from OAP in 1940s’, there might only several companies using it. In 1970s’, there were over 4,000 companies using EAP. In 2005, the utilization of EAP of the top 500 multinational companies is 100 percent. The percentage of usage in smaller companies is over 70%. There is a joke saying that, there are two things the top 500 will buy for sure, that’s computer and EAP. From 1987 when the accreditation of EAPA came out, to 2005, there were over 20,000 EAP providers like us. So the period length in US is about 30 years.
    But standing here speaking in today’s forum, I have this strong feeling, which is especially intense as I spoke with our experts, I believe that it won’t take 30 years’ development for EAP in China to become standardized, since we have support from our government and support from our academy in psychology, and we also have international support, including Mr. John Maynard, who is the chairman of EAPA. As Mr. Maynard spoke in the morning that they were working hard with our government to cooperate and introduce EAP qualification to China. Everyone sitting here, no matter where you are from, business, government, academic organization or other entities, is the disseminator of EAP in China.
    I think our confidence is mainly from two aspects: the first aspect is the need for EAP of Chinese companies, from my communications with many corporations representatives I can feel the need is very intense. There are also several companies already discussing with us to bring in EAP service to them. Second, EAP, as a successful business model, is a very perfect combination of behavioral science and business, I strongly believe this business model will gain its success and develop healthily in China. I want to tell you something Psychcn-Chestnut has done by now. Actually we have been preparing for a long time, and we have thought about it roundly. First, we consciously know that we have a long way to go, and we need to reach the international standard. From our team building, you can see the effort we’ve make. Our counselors are brought up in China, they have very good background in psychology, also they know Chinese culture very well, and they understand current need and worry of Chinese companies. At the same time, they all have oversea experience, so they also have good cross-cultural and cross-occupational background. Dr. John Pompe has talked about the IAP program they are doing with us, Alicia and Zhuma are the counselors in charge of this program. Zhuma works very hard today, doing the simultaneous interpretation. As you can see, they all have very good cross-cultural experience, living in China, studying abroad, which make our service possible to meet different demands of different cultures.
    Our team also went to states to get intense training in EAP, hoping they can bring back current ideas and technology of EAP to China. After we came back from states, they continued receiving training and supervision through telephone-meeting and face-to-face meeting by our experts, like Matt and Daolong. Actually, our counselors have 4 trainings per year, each lasts about half a month. We also recruited our affiliate all over China, and provided training to them as well. This is our preparation in people. We also have successfully developed our software system, which allows our service network to cover every spot of China and guarantee the quality of our service. We can communicate with our counselor to know their situation and how they provide our service to our customers. The most important point is that we can provide a complete utilization report and data analysis to our customers. And through last year, we put a lot of time and effort in promoting EAP in China, this kind of promotion is non-profitable. Since we know, we need to build a very good foundation in China, so that we can create more upon it. This kind of promotion is through our cooperation with EAPA, our free training to HR people in China, and our website construction, and other forms of non-profitable promotions.
The reason why we did all of these is to try to connect with the international standard of EAP service. We successfully hosted EAP forum last year and this year, hoping our effort will contribute to EAP development in China.
    To end up my presentation, I would like to use an interesting picture to close our forum. As you can see on the picture, the man on the picture was trying very hard to find something under the light, his wife asked him where you lost it, he answered outside of the house. His wife then asked, why you kept looking for it here. He said that there was light here. I feel the same way when we are doing our job. Sometimes it is hard to do the right thing, cause you will come across lots of trouble. But if you do some easier things just to avoid the troubles, you must be pushing the success away. It is the exact situation of EAP in China. As EAP providers, we need keep on trying hard. Thank you!