Benefits of Workplace Counseling
Behind every successful organization, there are hard-worker staff who exerted effort to meet the target goals, closed the deals, and undeniably, have been assets to your rising sales. But the fact that there is no successful organization free of stress or has stress-free employees.
Your employees can have mental and psychological health problems arising out of workplace-related issues in their day-to-day life. They may have problems with their subordinates, colleagues, working system, or may have a race against deadlines, huge targets, higher goals, achieving accomplishments, combined with issues in their personal life that have totally left their emotional and physical foundations weak.
These causes can affect employees’ performance in the organization, as well as affects the organization itself. Research has proven that there’s a strong connection between an employee’s psychological well-being and their productivity at work. Some businesses have started counseling at the workplace to retain their current employees, to increase productivity, and preventing resignation or termination. This is one of the best ways to motivate their employee.
What is Workplace Counseling?
Workplace counseling can be defined as providing brief and accessible psychological therapy for employees of an organization, which is included in the employee benefits program paid by the employer. The primary objective of counseling is to achieve helping employees to improve and develop or bring an employee back to his normal mental condition in which he was before the emotional problem began.
The counseling process is about the employer providing a session room for an employee, giving them a safe place and assurance of confidentiality to talk about issues that trouble them, and allowing counselors to help them find their own solutions or develop better ways to cope with issues. It is not just about giving advice but providing a non-judgmental, constructive, empathic, and accessible means to allow an employee to find a way forward.
Nowadays, a counseling session may be conducted face-to-face or a telephone-based conversation. It is also adopting new technology every day such as online counseling through e-mails, messaging, video calls, etc. to speed up communication with employees even when working from home or away from the office.
Counseling required not only to be confidential but also voluntary. Therefore, the employer should not use counseling as a conditional requirement or discipline staff. Some employers consider the workplace counseling should only be used to address employee’s work-life issues. While work-related issues, including stress, overwork, bullying, and difficult colleagues, can of course directly affect an employee’s performance, personal issues can also have a similar negative impact.
Having workplace counseling has a lot of benefits not only for employees but for the organization as well. It can act as a bridge between employees and organizations towards successful relations, understanding both parties, and uniting to achieve business goals.
The benefits of workplace counseling for employees include:
- Free and easy access to professional counselors.
- A safe space to talk about their problems.
- Helping employees to better understand themselves.
- Coping with the situation and the stress.
- Developing better decision making.
- Understand the situation and help to look at the new and positive perspective.
- It may prevent termination from the employer.
- Increase self-confidence.
The benefits of workplace counseling for employers include:
- Improved employee performance leading to productivity and functional improvements.
- Reduced employee tardiness and absenteeism.
- It may prevent resignation from employees.
- It reduces the cost of hiring new employees and training new staff.
- Productive way to handle sensitive situations or employees with behavioral issues.
- It helps to create a positive environment in the workplace.
- Establish a reputation as an employer that cares about their employees.
Keys to success:
- Professional Counselors (should be a registered Psychologist or trained professional with a good understanding of the employees’ work environment, good listener, empathetic, patient, trustworthy)
- Confidentiality (the assurance providing that the counselor would not disclose his/her personal problems or issues to others in the organization)
- Free (counseling is offered or included in the employee benefits)
- Easy-access (a safe space within the office and should be able to get an appointment in a short period of time)
Conclusion:
Stress is inevitable in human nature and so to enhance employee motivation, the willpower of the employee, and the satisfaction of the employers, the workplace counseling session or counseling program is vital.
The corporate world is changing and so, as well as the Human Resource process. Workplace counseling is not just purposely helping the employees, but also contributes well to overall progress and helping to show how much the organization cares for its employees. It helps to increase the productivity of employees and the confidence about the work, and the organization gains operation improvements while knowing that they’re helping to improve the lives of their employees.
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