What is Counselling? Definitions, Characteristics, Needs, Types, Steps

What is Counselling?

Counselling is discussion of a problem that usually has emotional content with an employee in order to help the employee cope with it better. Counselling seeks to improve employee mental health.

The ultimate goal of counselling is to help individuals improve their mental health, achieve personal growth and self-awareness, and build healthier relationships with themselves and others.

Definitions

Personnel counselling is defined as discussion of an emotional problem with an employee, with the general objective of reducing it so that performance is maintained at adequate level or even improved upon.<span class="su-quote-cite"> Ghosh and Ghorpade</span>

Counselling is discussion of a problem that usually has emotional content with an employee in order to help the employee cope with it better. Counselling seeks to improve employee mental health‖.<span class="su-quote-cite">Keith Davis </span>

What is Employee Counselling?

Employee counselling can be explained as providing help and support to the employees to face and sail through the difficult times in life. At many points of time in life or career people come across some problems either in their work or personal life when it starts influencing and affecting their performance and,ncreasing the stress levels of the individual.

Counselling is guiding, consoling, advising, sharing and helping to resolve their problems whenever the need arises. Technically, Psychological Counselling, a form of counselling is used by the experts to analyse the work related performance and behaviour of the employees to help them cope with it, resolve the conflicts and tribulations and reenforce the desired results.

Ingredients of Counselling

Counselling of staff is becoming an essential function of the managers. The organization can take either the help of experienced employees or expert, professional counsellor to take up the counselling activities. Increasing complexities in the lives of the employees need to address various aspects like:-

Performance Counselling

Ideally, the need for employee counselling arises when the employee shows signs of declining performance, being stressed in office-hours, bad decision-making, etc. In such situations, counselling is one of the best ways to deal with them.

It should cover all the aspects related to the employee performance like the targets, employee‘s responsibilities, problems faced, employee aspirations, inter-personal relationships at the workplace, etc.

Personal and Family Wellbeing

Families and friends are an important and inseparable part of the employee‘s life. Many a times, employees carry the baggage of personal problems to their workplaces, which in turn affects their performance adversely.

Therefore, the counsellor needs to strike a comfort level with the employees and, counselling sessions involving their families can help to resolve their problems and getting them back to workall fresh and enthusiastic.

Need of counselling at workplace

Apart from their personal problems, there are various reasons which can create stress for the employees at the workplace like unrealistic targets or workload, constant pressure to meet the deadlines, career problems, responsibility and accountability, conflicts or bad inter-personal relations with superiors and subordinates, problems in adjusting to the organizational culture.

Counselling helps the employee to share and look at his problems from a new perspective, help himself and to face and deal with the problems in a better way. Counselling at workplace is a way of the organization to care about its employees.

Hurdles faced for counselling at workplace

The biggest bottleneck in employee counselling at the workplace is the lack of trust on the employee‘s part to believe in the organization or his superior to share and understand his problems. The confidence that counsellor will not disclose employee‘s personal problems or issues, to others in the organization facilitates counselling. Time, effort and resources required on the part of the organization are a constraint.

Benefits of Counselling

The benefits of counselling are helping the individual to understand and help himself, understand the situations and look at them with a new perspective and positive outlook, helping in better decision making, alternate solutions to problems, coping with the situation and the stress.

Basic requisites of employee counselling

Employee Counselling needs to be tackled carefully, on the part of both the organization and the counsellor. The counselling can turn into a sensitive series of events for the employee and the organization; therefore, the counsellor should be either a professional or an experienced, mature employee.
The counsellor should be flexible in his approach and a patient listener. He should have the warmth required to win the trust of the employee so that he can share his thoughts and problems with him without any inhibitions.
Active and effective listening is one of the most important aspects of the employee counselling.
Time should not be a constraint in the process.
The counsellor should be able to identify the problem and offer concrete advice.
The counsellor should be able to help the employee to boost the morale and spirit of the employee, create a positive outlook and help him take decisions to deal with the problem.

Characteristics of Counselling

From the above definitions, counselling implies a number of characteristics. They are:

Counselling is an exchange of ideas and feelings between two people, a counsellor and a counselee, so it is an act of communication. Thus, successful counselling depends on communication skills.
Counselling facilitates the employees in coping with their emotional problems, which in turn helps in improving the organizational problems. Counselling also helps the organization to be more human and considerate with people‘s problems.
Counselling is generally confidential and hence employees feel free to talk openly about their problems involving both jobs and personal problems.
Counselling may be performed by both professionals and non-professionals.
Counselling enhances job satisfaction and morale of the employees.

Need for Counselling

In the present fast moving society, the employee is confronted with numerous problems, which may be personal in nature or related to his job. When these problems exist, employees‘ benefit from understanding and getting help, of the type that counselling can provide.

In such a situation, counselling facilitates in reducing his stressful condition and thereby returning to normal job performance and behaviour. Most problems that require counselling have some emotional content. Emotions are a normal part of life.

Nature gave people their emotions and these feelings make people human. On the other hand, emotions can get out of control and cause workers to do things that are harmful to their own interests and those of the organization. Counselling helps an emotionally disturbed employee to become normal, develop self-confidence, self-control and understanding so that he can work effectively.

Some of the conditions like frustration, job dissatisfaction, resistance to change, inter-‘ group conflict, inter-personal relationships etc., are the major causes of counselling needs.

In such a situation counselling facilitates in reducing his stressful condition and thereby returning to normal job performance and behaviour. Thus, counselling helps an emotionally disturbed employee to become normal, develop self-confidence, self-control and understanding so that he can work effectively.

The causes of counselling needs are:-

Conflict

Conflict arises when there is disagreement between two or more individuals or groups and each individual or group tries to gain acceptance of its views or objectives over the other one. Conflict is undesirable and it should be avoided and resolved as soon as possible.

Personal conflict is more emotional in nature and reflects feelings, anger, distrust, fear, resentment, and clash in personality, antagonism, tension, etc. The organizational conflict on the other hand involves disagreement on such factors as allocation of resources, organizational policies and procedures, nature of assignments and distribution of rewards.

Stress

Stress is a condition of strain that has a direct bearing on emotions, through processes and physical conditions of a person. When it is excessive, it can threaten one‘s ability to cope with the environment. People who are stressed may become nervous and develop chronic worry.

They are easily provoked to anger and are unable to relax. Stress also leads to physical disorders, because the internal body system changes to try to cope with stress. The causes of stress can be classified under two heads-

On-the-job Stress – The job itself may pose as the basic cause of stress. Employees may not be able to cope with the demands of the job or the requirements of the job may be unclear to them. On such occasions, the employees may feel that they have a work overload, pressures they cannot cope with tension, anxiety and insecurity. All these feelings cause stress.
Off-the-job Stress – the job, stress also affects the functioning of the employee. Causes of stress off-the job are numerous. Ability to tolerate stress is not same in all the people. People differ in their tolerance to stress. Some people can tolerate much greater stress than others. Stress is thus, one of the most important aspects of the employees, which needs to be kept at a level low enough to tolerate without developing disorders.
Frustration – Frustration is another major reason for counselling need. When an employee is repeatedly interfered with or hindered in such a way that prevents him from achieving a desired goal, it results in frustration.

Types of Counselling

There are several types of counselling that are commonly used to address a range of mental health issues and emotional concerns. Three Forms of Counselling are:

Directive Counselling

Directive counselling is the process of hearing a person‘s emotional problems, deciding what he should do, and then telling and motivating him to do it. Under directive counselling, the counsellor performs all the functions of counselling except reorientation.

If the directive counsellor listens to the employee‘s problems carefully and makes the counselee realise that his advice is worthwhile, directive counselling can be successful.

Non-Directive Counselling

Non-directive or client- centered counselling is the process of skilfully listening to a person and encouraging him to explain his emotional problems, understand them and determine courses of action.

It focuses on the counselee rather than the counsellor as judge and adviser and hence it is client centre. Professional counsellors generally follow non-directive counselling.

Participative Counselling or Co-operative Counselling

This form of counselling is worth a serious notice, as this appears to be more practically applicable and more readily suitable to managerial attitudes and temperaments in Indian organizational situations than the other two.

It is in the middle of directive and non-directive counselling. Participative counselling is a close and mental relationship between the counsellor and the counselee that establishes a co-operative exchange of ideas, information, knowledge, values, feelings etc., to solve the problems of the counselee.

Steps in Counselling Process

Counselling is meant to help in utilisation of human resources in the organization. The counsellor-manager has to help his employees to be aware of their strong and weak points and to improve upon the strong points and overcome their weaknesses.

In fact, every manager or supervisor is in a way counselling his employees knowingly or unknowingly every day. The usual counselling process goes through the following three phases of initiating developing of mutual understanding, openness and acceptance sometimes termed as rapport building.

Exploration

which involves understanding with the help of the counselee, the counselee‘s own situation, his feelings, his strengths and weaknesses, his problems and needs? The skill of the counsellor lies in making the counselee discover his own shortcomings and weaknesses and size up his problem in the light of mutuality of the organizational situation.

Formulation of action plan

Formulation of action plan for improved task performance in the organization. For counselling to be useful, it must culminate in formulation of an action plan, which the employee is led to evolve and commit to.

It may however, take more than one session to arrive at the ultimate stage of formulation of the plan but at the end of each session, the action plan following it may be worked out.

Drawbacks of Counselling

Counselling may help an employee for better adjustment with his superior but it does not improve the working environment.
Counselling attempts to change individual attitudes and behaviour, this does not last in the end.
In most of the cases, the employees blames their superiors or supervisors which generally objected by them, thus effecting counselling.
Counsellors usually follow an appeasement policy. They do not want to annoy the management by telling the reality.

Mentoring

Mentoring is an alliance that creates a space for dialogue that results in reflection, action and learning. Mentoring is nothing but developing insight to turn hindsight into foresight‘ Mentoring is a synergetic relationship – two or more people, engaged in a process that achieves more than each could alone.

Process of mentoring starts with building the relationship, negotiating agreements, developing the mentee and ending the relation mentoring is the ongoing relationship that can last for a long period of time.

It can be informal and meetings can take place when the mentee need some advice support or guidance. The mentor who is usually an experienced and qualified person who will be senior in the organisation. The focus is mainly on career and personal development.

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