PRC Workforce
Strategic Brief

The 90% your EAP doesn't reach.

A 90-day anonymous protocol for the senior professionals, mid-tier leaders, and high-functioning team members who will not self-refer.

No clinical pathway. No HR involvement. No names recorded.

Prepared by Jon Cull, Founder
12 years clear. 8 years on the front line.
prcworkforce.com · jon@prcworkforce.com

The format is the barrier. Not the person.

Every standard route to workplace support requires the one thing a high-functioning professional will not do: identify themselves as someone who needs it.

The cost of that refusal does not show up in absence reports. It shows up in slower decisions, thinner output, and a senior operator running below capacity for months while every dashboard still reads green.

£10,500
Lost output from one senior employee running at 70% capacity for six months. Derived from Deloitte Human Capital Trends, 2024
22.1M
Working days lost to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. A record high in Great Britain. HSE work-related stress statistics, 2025
1 in 4
UK workers who say work is negatively affecting their health. 5,017 workers surveyed. CIPD Good Work Index, 2025
~1 in 10
The share of the workforce that actually uses the EAP the employer is paying for. The rest is paid-for capacity that never gets touched. EAPA UK, published utilisation data

Why existing provision fails

Senior professionals are the population most likely to be carrying a performance-affecting pattern, and the least likely to engage with what is on offer. Every existing route runs through the professional chain. The career cost of stepping onto it is too high, so they don't.

That is the 90% gap. Your EAP was never built to close it.

Fear of stigma and its consequences inhibits workers from disclosing a problem to their managers.

Dewa et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2021

Disclosure inside the workplace carries a real risk of discriminatory response: a paper trail, and the signal that the professional is now on a watched pathway.

Brohan and Thornicroft, Occupational Medicine, 2010

We don't treat the driver. We align the machine.

A performance problem rarely arrives labelled as one. It arrives as a vibration. Output that used to run smooth starts to shudder under load. Decisions take longer. The gap between demands stops being long enough to recover in. The individual is still driving and still hitting most of the marks, but the machine is out of alignment and the cost is compounding quietly.

Most provision works on the driver. It asks the person to notice the vibration, name it, and try harder to hold the wheel steady. That is the part that fails, because it adds load to a system that is already overloaded.

PRC works on the alignment instead. The vibration is read as a symptom of a misaligned workflow, not a defect in the person operating it.

I understand the habit, but more importantly, I understand the operational disruption caused by the feedback loop between external pressure and internal coping.

The protocol resets the parameters of the operation. It restores baseline capacity without asking the individual to try to behave differently. We don't treat the driver. We align the machine.

Three phases. Ninety days. Entirely private.

PRC operates on the mechanism underneath the presenting behaviour: the same trigger-response architecture that sits under every stressor pattern. The protocol does not need to know what the specific problem is to act on the mechanism that drives it.

Pillar 1 · Mapping · Days 1–30

The first 30 days make visible what has never been formally examined. The trigger sequence. The 90 minutes before the default fires. The real operational cost, which is cumulative rather than dramatic.

By Day 30 the pattern is mapped, the triggers are identified, and the cost is on the table.

Wood and Neal, Psychological Review, 2007
Pillar 2 · Redesign · Days 31–60

The trigger has an architecture: a location, a time, a sequence of events that precede it. Pillar 2 changes that architecture structurally, not through willpower. The conditions that produce the default are redesigned so the default has less to work with.

By Day 60 the environmental architecture is rebuilt and a structural replacement is running.

Wood, Tam and Guerrero Witt, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005
Pillar 3 · Installation · Days 61–90

The automatic response is replaced with a deliberate one, then the deliberate one is made automatic. The protocol builds an operating default that runs without effort, without willpower, and without the programme.

By Day 90 the new default is installed and running on its own. The recovered capacity is being put back to work.

Haynes et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2009

Full mechanism documentation, including the CBT, behavioural-activation and habit-formation mapping, is at prcworkforce.com/mechanism.html.

Your organisation sees what matters. Nothing that identifies.

Anonymity is not a courtesy. It is the design condition that makes the protocol work. Senior professionals will only engage if disclosure is structurally impossible, not merely promised. PRC is built so the employing organisation cannot identify who enrolled, even if it set out to.

Seat numbers only

Each participant is assigned a seat number. No name is attached at any point. Reporting shows seats occupied, seats active, and aggregate completion data.

No HR pathway

PRC is procured as a performance investment. HR is involved in the purchase. HR is not involved in any individual's participation. The two are structurally separated from Day 1.

No data sharing

Individual response data, progress data and worksheet content are held by the PRC system only. They are never shared with the employer and never made available to HR.

No label attached

Participants are not assigned a diagnosis, a category, or a clinical identity. They are running a 90-day operational protocol. That is the only descriptor that applies.

Your organisation sees seat numbers, completion rates, and aggregate outcome movement. Everything that tells you it is working. Nothing that identifies who is in it.

The employee has the same guarantee in reverse: no information is passed to their employer. Not promised. Structurally enforced from Day 1.

Measurement: the PRC Index

Seven self-report measures, each rated 1 to 10, recorded at Day 1, Day 30, Day 60 and Day 90. Aggregate cohort movement is reported to the organisation quarterly. No individual scores are ever released.

Delgadillo et al., Lancet Psychiatry, 2018

One restored senior pays for the entire licence.

PRC is priced the way HR Directors already buy: per employee, per year. No seat caps. No rationing. Anyone in the workforce can enrol privately at any time.

Tier Size band Per employee / year Total range
Pilot Up to 50 emp. £59 £1,475–£2,950
Annual 251–1,000 emp. £24 £9,750–£24,000
Enterprise 1,000+ emp. From £24 Bespoke

All tiers include site-wide enrolment, unlimited 90-day cohorts across 12 months, the full PRC Index measurement framework, quarterly aggregate cohort reporting, the clinical-concern off-ramp, and direct access to Jon Cull. The contract is a 12-month rolling term with 90 days' notice to cancel.

The maths

One senior professional running at 70% capacity for six months represents around £10,500 in lost output. Replacing a senior costs 100–150% of annual salary once recruitment, onboarding and performance ramp are counted.

Deloitte Human Capital Trends, 2024; CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning Survey, 2024

At Standard pricing, a 250-employee licence is £9,750 for the year. One restored senior covers it. For most organisations, a single good outcome pays for the whole investment.

For comparison: a typical UK EAP costs around £14 per employee per year and is used by roughly one in ten of the workforce. PRC is built for the other 90%.

EAPA UK, published utilisation data

What PRC is. What PRC is not.

PRC is a 90-day behavioural protocol delivered by structured email. It is not therapy, counselling, or any form of clinical treatment. It does not diagnose. It does not prescribe. It does not operate as a psychological service.

Site-wide enrolment applies regardless of job grade, hours worked, or whether the participant is already engaged with other support. The mechanism the protocol operates on is consistent across role and level. The cost of that mechanism differs from person to person; the mechanism itself does not. PRC sits alongside whatever is already in place. It does not require anyone to stop, disclose, or replace anything else.

If a clinical concern surfaces during the protocol, the participant is directed to the appropriate clinical service. PRC holds the seat, applies no fee, and applies no restart penalty. The off-ramp is structural, not discretionary.

The PRC Index is a set of seven self-report measures rated 1 to 10. It is not independently validated as a clinical outcome measure. It tracks how the participant rates their own observable output across the 90-day period. Nothing more is claimed.

Full disclosures: prcworkforce.com/disclosures.html

Book a call with Jon.

Thirty minutes. No obligation. Jon takes every first call himself. It covers what you are currently spending on existing provision, what utilisation actually looks like in your workforce, and whether PRC is the right fit. If it is not, you will be told.

Direct line+44 7493 087262

Emailjon@prcworkforce.com

Calendlycalendly.com/joncull1/30min

Websiteprcworkforce.com

Every claim, sourced.

Every statistic and research-backed assertion in this brief is sourced below. Published, peer-reviewed, or government-survey data. Dated and linked to the original work.

Deloitte Human Capital Trends, 2024. Lost-output calculation, senior professional at 70% capacity. deloitte.com/uk
Deloitte, Mental health and employers, 2024. UK presenteeism and absence cost to employers. deloitte.com/uk
HSE, Work-related stress, depression or anxiety statistics in Great Britain, 2025. 22.1 million working days lost in 2024/25; record high. hse.gov.uk/statistics
CIPD Good Work Index, 2025. One in four UK workers say work negatively affects their health. 5,017 workers surveyed. cipd.org
EAPA UK. Average UK EAP utilisation, published utilisation data underpinning the 90% reach gap. eapa.org.uk
Wood and Neal, Psychological Review, 2007. Habit formation and environmental context. doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
Wood, Tam and Guerrero Witt, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005. Context change and behaviour disruption. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.6.918
Haynes et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 2009. Fixed-sequence checklist protocol outcomes. doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa0810119
Delgadillo et al., Lancet Psychiatry, 2018. Measurement-based care in large-scale behavioural services. doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(18)30162-7
Dewa et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2021. Disclosure decisions to managers and stigma as a barrier. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.631032
Brohan and Thornicroft, Occupational Medicine, 2010. Stigma and discrimination of mental health problems: workplace implications (editorial). doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqq048
CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning Survey, 2024. Senior employee replacement cost benchmarks. cipd.org
© 2026 PRC Workforce · prcworkforce.com · jon@prcworkforce.com