Solution-Focused Practice (SFP) offers Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) a practical, evidence-based approach to working with employees and organizations. The brief, goal-directed language of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) aligns naturally with EAP practice, where time is often limited, and the work focuses on what employees want to be different. SFP extends these principles beyond individual sessions to work with groups and organizations (Morgan, 2016; Garvey et al., 2026).
The work begins with the person’s best hopes: What are their best hopes from this conversation so that it will be helpful and worth their time? From there, the practitioner becomes curious about what the person is already doing that helps, what has helped before, and what they want to be doing differently.
EAPs work with both employees and organizations. In addition to providing confidential services to employees and family members, practitioners consult with supervisors and managers and work with organizations on concerns affecting employees and the workplace. EAPs have evolved considerably from their early focus on alcoholism to address concerns arising both within and beyond the workplace (Ghosh, 2020). Despite their widespread availability, only a small percentage of eligible workers use EAP services. Long (2024) reports that approximately 73% of U.S. employers and 88% of U.K. employers offer an EAP, yet cites a U.S. utilization rate of only 5.5%. This gap between availability and use is a significant missed opportunity, especially given the growing demand for accessible mental health services.
What employees bring to an EAP does not always divide neatly into personal and workplace problems. Anxiety, grief, illness, financial strain, relationship difficulties, poverty, and racism can affect an employee at work. The workplace can also create or intensify distress. Chronic understaffing can exhaust employees. Harassment can make going to work frightening. Inflexible schedules can collide with childcare and caregiving responsibilities. An employee may follow every required procedure for reporting discrimination and still return to the conditions that prompted the complaint. Another may work full-time and still be unable to afford housing, food, healthcare, or other necessities.
How Solution-Focused Practice Fits EAP Work
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy does not require a detailed history of the problem. The practitioner does not need to fully understand how or why a problem developed before asking what the employee wants to be different and what they want instead.
This gives SFBT broad applicability. Employees come to EAPs with very different concerns, from grief and relationship difficulties to financial stress and problems at work. The solution-focused process can apply across these concerns because the work is guided by what the employee hopes to change, rather than the type of problem they bring.
Who Has the Agency to Change What?
An employee can make choices, ask for help, use resources, and decide what to do next. But they cannot hire more staff, approve leave, change a workplace policy, or decide how an organization responds to harassment. Sometimes the person who needs something to change is not the person who has the power to change it. Solution-Focused Practice can work with both by asking who has the agency to act and what each person can do.
Snyder (2002) describes hope as involving both agency and pathways toward what a person wants or needs. Solution-focused language and scaling address both by identifying what is already helping, what can change, and what might move things forward. Solution-focused questions can be asked of an employee developing a plan for what they can do, or of a manager or organizational leader with the authority to change workload, staffing, policies, or other workplace conditions. The questions are similar. The answers locate agency in very different places.
Anne Lutz’s Solution-Focused Four-Square Framework in EAP Practice
Lutz’s Four-Square Framework offers EAP practitioners a way to organize brief, solution-focused conversations with employees while also considering the relationships, resources, and organizational influences connected to their best hopes. The framework is not a rigid sequence. Practitioners move among the four squares as the conversation unfolds, following the employee’s words, emotions, experiences, relationships, hopes, and positive differences. Amygdala Whispering and Languaging weave through all four squares, requiring attunement to the employee’s emotions and language and informing how practitioners listen, respond, and decide what to ask next (Lutz, 2018, 2025).
Square 1: Agency and Resource Activation
Square 1 uncovers what the employee is already doing and what has already made a positive difference. The practitioner listens for these moments with curiosity.
When has this been a little better? What do you know has helped? What else do you know helped? How did you do that? Who helped? Where did you find support?
These past-tense, presuppositional questions assume competence and convey agency. If they’ve done it before they can do it again. When overwhelmed, employees can lose sight of how they have already managed challenging situations. Their answers help employees recognize what they have already done and how they did it.
Square 2: VIP Mapping — Relationships and Influential Presences
VIP Mapping expands the conversation beyond the individual. VIPs (Very Important Presences) help, encourage, or strengthen a person as they pursue their best hopes. VIPPs (Very Important Powerful Problematic Presences) hold power that can interfere with what a person wants or needs. VIPs and VIPPs extend beyond people to organizations, policies, systems, communities, and cultural expectations. Mapping them can expand possibilities for solutions beyond what the individual can do alone.
Who do you most appreciate at work? Who else? Who most appreciates your work? What would they say they most appreciate about your work? Who has the authority to make this decision? How have you managed the influence of this VIPP? Who do you know who could help you with what you need?
“Who decides?” clarifies what the employee can do and what someone else has the authority to decide. An employee can ask which assignments should take priority, but a supervisor may decide what to postpone or reassign.
Square 3: Best Hopes Mapping and Goal Setting
Best Hopes Mapping develops what the person wants and needs into a detailed picture of what they hope to be doing differently. The practitioner uses open-ended, presuppositional questions and places those hopes within a time frame, whether the next 10 minutes, week, month, or year.
For example, an EAP practitioner might ask, “Suppose you woke up on Sunday morning, looked back at the week, and said, ‘That was a satisfying week at work.’ What would you have been doing during the week?” The practitioner follows the employee’s words: “What else would you be doing?” “Who would notice?” “What would they notice?” “When?” “Where?” “How?” These questions turn a broad hope such as “a satisfying week” into actions the employee and others could actually notice.
Before offering advice, the practitioner can also ask, “What do you know about your situation?” and “What have you tried?” People often know far more about their circumstances and have tried far more than initially becomes apparent. Unsolicited advice can be heard as criticism, particularly when it overlooks what the employee already knows, has tried, and learned from experience.
Square 4: Solution-Focused Scaling
Solution-Focused Scaling builds on the employee’s best hopes and the positive words and clear verbs developed throughout the conversation. Scaling can further activate an employee’s agency, help develop a realistic plan, and explore how VIPs might contribute to that plan. Numbers also give the employee and practitioner a shared reference point. Lutz (2018, 2025) describes numerical questions as helping calm the amygdala and bring the person “upstairs” toward the frontal lobe, where critical thinking and additional possibilities become available.
Suppose 10 means the employee feels confident deciding what is needed and managing competing demands at work, and 1 is the opposite. If the employee says 4, the practitioner asks, “What keeps the number from being lower?” and “What else?” Their answers uncover what they are already doing that helps. The practitioner then asks, “What would be a good-enough number?” If the employee says 6: “What would you be doing at a 6?” “What else?” “Who would notice?” “What would they notice?” Once the employee has described the 6 in clear actions, the practitioner asks, “What is one thing you can do your best to do to raise your number?”
Scaling can also reveal who has the agency or authority to do what. Moving from a 4 toward a 6 might involve asking which deadline takes priority. The employee can ask; a supervisor may need to set the priority, redistribute work, or reduce the workload. The scale develops the plan while showing who has the authority to carry out each part of it.
Amygdala Whispering and Solution-Focused Languaging
Amygdala Whispering and Languaging are woven throughout the Four Square framework. Both require careful attunement: Amygdala Whispering to the person’s emotional experience and Languaging to the person’s language and words.
Amygdala Whispering
Amygdala Whispering begins with attunement to the person’s emotional experience. The practitioner tentatively names the emotion, places “for you” at the end, and follows the affirmation with a solution-focused question. An employee describing mounting deadlines and short staffing might hear, “This sounds stressful and overwhelming for you. How have you managed?” The practitioner listens for the employee’s affirmation, a “yes” that the words fit their experience, while the question turns attention to how they have responded and managed.
Lutz (2018, 2025) describes this as helping the person move from the amygdala’s fight-or-flight response “upstairs” toward the frontal lobe, where critical thinking and more possibilities become available.
Solution-Focused Languaging
Solution-Focused Languaging begins with careful attention to the person’s words. People often describe what they do not want, what is going wrong, or what they want to stop. The practitioner uses their language to become curious about what they want to do instead, then develops those words into clear verbs and observable actions.
For example, a manager might say, “I’m tired of putting out fires all day. Everyone comes to me with every problem.” The practitioner asks, “What would you like to be doing instead?” The manager responds, “I want my team to handle more things without always needing me.” The practitioner follows the manager’s words: “Suppose your team was handling more things without always needing you. What would you be doing differently?” The manager says, “I’d ask what they’ve already tried before giving them an answer. I’d listen to their ideas and ask what they think they could do next.”
The practitioner might then ask, “When have you already done that?” and become curious about what the manager did, how they did it, and who noticed. The manager, rather than the practitioner, defines what effective leadership looks like and identifies what they would be doing differently (Lutz, 2018, 2025).
Using Solution-Focused Practice With Employees and Organizational Leaders
The same Four-Square Framework can be directed toward the individual employee and toward organizational leadership.
| Four Square | With the Individual Employee | With Organizational Leadership |
|---|---|---|
| Past and Present Actions | When has this been a little better for you? What did you do? How did you do that? How have you managed? What are you most proud of in the work you do? What else? | When has this been a little better for employees here? What was leadership doing differently? How did you make that happen? What are you most proud of within your organization? What else? |
| VIP Mapping | Who has made a positive difference? Who do you most appreciate at work? What do they most appreciate about your work? Who has helped you move toward your best hopes? | Who has helped create positive differences for employees? Who has influence here? Who has the authority to make changes? Who decides? |
| Best Hopes Mapping | What are your best hopes for your work to be satisfying? What would you be doing differently? What do you know about your situation? What have you tried? | What are your best hopes for employees and the organization? What would employees notice leadership doing differently? What do you know about what is already working? What have you tried? |
| Solution-Focused Scaling | What keeps your number from being lower? What number on the scale would be good enough for you? What would you be doing at the good-enough number? What would you be doing one number higher than you are now? | What keeps the organization’s number from being lower? What is leadership already doing that contributes to that number? What number would be good enough? What would the organization be doing at the good-enough number? What would employees notice leadership doing one number higher? |
The questions are similar. The answers locate agency in very different places.
Research on Solution-Focused Practice in EAPs and the Workplace
Neipp and Beyebach (2022) identified 251 outcome studies conducted across psychotherapy, coaching, school counseling, and community settings, using individual and group formats. More recent meta-analytic research found positive psychosocial outcomes across clinical and nonclinical populations, with particularly strong findings in nonclinical and community-based settings (Vermeulen-Oskam et al., 2024). An umbrella review also found evidence of effectiveness across a range of populations and concerns, while identifying important limitations in the quality of the existing reviews (Żak & Pękala, 2025).
Workplace research is smaller but especially relevant to EAPs. Gerhát et al. (2025) conducted a randomized controlled study with 84 white-collar employees, comparing Solution-Focused Brief Coaching with a waitlist control group. Employees in the coaching group received three 60-minute sessions approximately two weeks apart. The researchers measured performance through 360-degree evaluations from employees, managers, and peers, along with measures of self-efficacy, well-being, and positive and negative affect. Employees who received coaching showed improvements across these outcomes, with positive effects maintained during follow-up. The study is particularly relevant to EAP practice because the intervention consisted of only three sessions, with improvements maintained at follow-up.
Garvey et al. (2026) reviewed 11 studies involving 418 workers in medical, health, and social-care settings. Across the studies, Solution-Focused Practice was associated with changes in how people worked, including greater collaboration, more attentive listening, and a shift from telling people what to do toward asking questions and developing meaningful outcomes with them. Workers also described improvements in job satisfaction, confidence, motivation, emotional well-being, workplace relationships, and team cohesion, while some studies reported reductions in stress and burnout. The review also identified organizational barriers. Time pressures, limited organizational support, and problem-focused workplace cultures could interfere with implementing SFP. Garvey et al. caution against treating an individual-level intervention as the answer to systemic problems such as underfunding or workforce shortages, instead pointing to the importance of organizational and leadership practices that support solution-focused work.
Bouzikos et al. (2022) demonstrate why EAP work cannot be understood only at the individual level. Employees who received one to three EAP sessions showed significant reductions in psychological distress, but the improvement was greater when employees worked in organizations with a high Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC). The EAP intervention reduced employee distress without significantly changing the organizational climate. The authors argue that EAPs may have greater impact when individual interventions are combined with organizational attention to the policies, practices, and procedures that protect worker psychological health and safety.
Morgan (2016) examined Solution-Focused Practice at the organizational level through Planning Alternative Tomorrows with Hope (PATH), a solution-focused approach adapted from individual work for groups of professionals navigating organizational change. Participants developed a preferred future, identified people needed to help move toward it, and translated longer-term hopes into actions that could begin within months, weeks, days, or immediately. Participants described greater ownership of the change process, clearer direction, and movement toward concrete next steps. Morgan also found that organizational change could not occur in isolation; progress could be constrained when other parts of the larger system also needed change.
The research supports working at both levels. If an employee is overwhelmed because a department is chronically understaffed, helping the employee cope does not increase staffing. If an employee cannot afford medication, identifying strengths does not lower the price. If an employee is being harassed, helping that employee manage anxiety does not stop the harassment.
Solution-Focused Practice Across the EAP
Solution-Focused Practice gives EAP practitioners a way to work with both employees and the organizations in which they work. With employees, the conversation can uncover what they are already doing, what helps, what they want instead, and what they can do next. With supervisors and organizational leaders, the same questions can examine what is already working, what employees need, and what the organization has the authority to change. The questions may be similar. Who has the agency and authority to act may be very different.
References
Bouzikos, S., Afsharian, A., Dollard, M., & Brecht, O. (2022). Contextualising the effectiveness of an Employee Assistance Program intervention on psychological health: The role of corporate climate. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(9), 5067. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095067
Garvey, A., van Nieuwerburgh, C., & Burke, J. M. (2026). The impact of Solution Focused Practice on workplace wellbeing: A systematic review. Journal of Interprofessional Care. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2026.2710779
Gerhát, R., Ocsenás, D., & Münnich, Á. (2025). Enhancing performance, self-efficacy and well-being: A randomised controlled study in solution-focused business coaching. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 23(1), 24–48. https://doi.org/10.24384/7s2w-9g73
Ghosh, K. (2020). Employees Assistance Programme; social work at workplace: An evidence based review. International Journal of Social Sciences, 9(4), 301–306. https://doi.org/10.30954/2249-6637.04.2020.12
Long, T. (2024). Why are employee assistance programmes under-utilised and marginalised and how to address it? A critical review and a labour process analysis. Human Resource Management Journal, 34(4), 1134–1153. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12547
Lutz, A. B. (2018). A language of hope: The top 10 solution-focused translations. Psychiatric News, 53(16). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2018.8b31
Lutz, A. B. (2025). The solution-focused mindset for anxiety and depression: A workbook to manage emotions, harness strengths, and feel better. New Harbinger Publications.
Morgan, G. (2016). Organisational change: A solution-focused approach. Educational Psychology in Practice, 32(2), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/02667363.2015.1125855
Neipp, M.-C., & Beyebach, M. (2022). The global outcomes of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: A revision. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 52(1), 110–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926187.2022.2069175
Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01
Vermeulen-Oskam, E., Franklin, C., van ’t Hof, L. P. M., Stams, G. J. J. M., van Vugt, E. S., Assink, M., Veltman, E. J., Froerer, A. S., Staaks, J. P. C., & Zhang, A. (2024). The current evidence of solution-focused brief therapy: A meta-analysis of psychosocial outcomes and moderating factors. Clinical Psychology Review, 114, 102512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102512
Żak, A. M., & Pękala, K. (2025). Effectiveness of solution-focused brief therapy: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Psychotherapy Research, 35(7), 1043–1055. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2024.2406540
