Employee Assistance Programs in Organizations – Employee Counseling

Objectives of Employee Counseling

Employee counseling helps a person overcome emotional problems and weaknesses relating to performance. It involves the following objectives:

1. Provide empathic atmosphere of genuine concern about his difficulties, tensions, worries, problems, etc., so that he can freely discuss and share his views with counselor;
2. Understand himself better and to gain knowledge about his potential, strengths and weaknesses;
3. Gain an insight into the dynamics of his behavior by providing necessary feedback;
4. Have better understanding of the environment in which he functions;
5. Increase his personal and interpersonal effectiveness by assisting him in analyzing his interpersonal competence;
6. Prepare alternate action plans for improving on his performance and behavior.

Characteristics of Employee Counseling

1. Counseling is an exchange of ideas and feelings between two people.
2. It tries to improve organizational performance by helping the employees to cope with the problems.
3. It makes organization be more human and considerate with people’s problems.
4. Counseling may be performed by both professionals and non-professionals.
5. Counseling is usually confidential in order to have free talk and discussions.
6. It involves both job and personal problems.

Need for Employee   Counseling

Need for employee counseling arises due to various causes in addition to stress. These causes include: emotions, inter-personal problems and conflict at place, inability to meet job demands, over-work load, confrontation with authority, responsibility and accountability, conflicts with the superiors, subordinates and management and various family problems, health problems, career problems etc.

Functions of Employee Counseling

The general objective of employee counseling in organizations is to help employees to improve their mental health and develop in self-confidence, understanding, self-control and ability to work effectively. This objective can be achieved by performing various counseling functions. They are:

1. Advice: One of the important functions of counseling is offering advice to the counselee. The counselor has to understand the problem of the counselee completely, before offering advice and suggesting a course of action.
2. Reassurance: In order to give courage to face a problem confidently, counseling provides employees with reassurance. Normally reassurance is not acceptable to the counselee. However, it is useful in some situations.
3. Communication: Counseling will improve both upward and downward communication abilities of the counselees.
4. Release of Emotional Tension: Releasing emotional tension is an important function of counseling. People feel emotional release from their frustration after counseling. Release of tension may not solve the entire problem, but run over mental blocks to the solution.
5. Clarified Thinking: Release of tension and thereby removal of mental blocks to the solution through counseling allows the counselee to think freely and objectively. Thus, clarified thinking tends to be the result of emotional release.
6. Reorientation: Reorientation is not just emotional release or clear thinking, but it involves a change in the counselee’s psychic self through a change in the basic goals and values.

Benefits of Employee Counseling

Performance counseling takes a positive approach. The underlying philosophy is quite simple: People can grow and improve their competence and performance with timely help and proper coaching. ‘An effective counselor-manager is one who helps his employees to become more aware of their strengths and weakness and helps them to improve further on the strong points and overcome weaknesses’. Counseling, generally speaking, offers the following benefits to the counselee:

1. He learns to respond and adjust more positively to people and situations
2. He is able to improve his personal effectiveness
3. He is able to clear the mind of emotional irritants; overcome his personal weaknesses and work more effectively.
4. He feels more relaxed when he is able to share his concerns and problems with a trusted friend, the counselor who assures confidentiality and extends a helping hand readily.