Employee Counseling

What is Counseling

Counselling is a safe space that helps people understand the purpose of their behaviors and choices. This clarity in thinking helps them determine and be effective to have conducive outcomes. People usually know what to do to be physically healthy i.e., get enough sleep, exercise and eat a balanced diet. People know that you should be kind to your spouse and not yell at your kids. Yet despite knowing this, people do not do it. Filling of this gap is where counselling is therapeutic.

Benefits of Counselling

1. The session doesn’t give advice but rather partners with people to stimulate their inner resources to rethink, recalibrate and reorient.
2. Counselling helps people become consciously aware of what they really feel, let feelings be processed and release emotional tension by digesting emotions and then take decisions. Emotions can overwhelm and cloud clarity. Once Emotional literacy and Emotion management is learnt, emotions become a compass for us to navigate towards favorable outcomes.
3. People get stuck in the same ways of reacting, almost like being in a spell of an automatic program that recurs in spite of failed outcomes. Counselling helps people understand their repetitive patterns and traps (non-conducive beliefs and outcomes). It helps to identify motivators & triggers in life.
4. Counselling helps people to align their intentions with their behaviors. A counselling session can bring to surface a blind spot that the client is unaware of but is impacting their lives. Counselor helps by Reorientation – It is a process of encouragement to bring internal changes in goals, values, and mental models, helping employees to leverage their strengths and guarding against their weaknesses.
5. Clarity in Thinking – It is the function of encouragement to the employees to be rational and realistic. Employees often lose their emotional balance in executing their assignments and jobs, and hence commit errors in decisions & judgement. Helping them to be rational by clarifying their way of thinking, puts them back into the realities and enables them to achieve the results. A counselling session provides a different perspective to the situation (zoom out) which is not available to the client since they are so zoomed into the problem.
6. Counselling provides confidential support. This means that everything you discuss with the counsellor is private, between you and the counsellor. The exception is when a counsellor has a duty of care to report something that threatens your wellbeing or the wellbeing of others. This legal requirement will be explained to you in your first counselling session.
7. Counselling is cathartic, just to be heard without being judged. Empathy has calming effects on the individual sense of being overwhelmed. Here the counsellor listens to the problems of the employees and then guides them to clarity. Reassurance is the function of restoring the confidence of the employees, helping them to feel courageous, to gain strength, and to develop positive thinking. In cases, where employees are entrusted with challenging assignments, reassuring them is very important, to help them realize that they can achieve the results

A trained counsellor is someone trained to offer a talk-based therapy. There are many different types of talk-based therapy. A counsellor may work in partnership with a medical doctor or other health professional at times to give comprehensive and integrated care.

There are many different types of counselling and approaches that counsellors use will vary.

Steps in Employee Counselling

1. Initiating – Building trust & confidence in counselor and his methodology/process.
2. Exploring – Counselee describes situations, feelings, problems, and the needs.
3. Framing of Action Plan – Measuring and monitoring behavioral changes for desired results

Where counseling can be helpful

Anyone who is struggling with a personal concern can seek counselling. No issue is too big or too small to ask for support. Common issues that people seek counselling for include:

• grief and loss
• communication and relationships issues
• work and career issues
• stress, anxiety and depression
• life transitions such as the birth of a new baby, separation, divorce or the death of a family member or friend
• parenting
• addiction
• abuse
• trauma
• self-esteem difficulties
• exploring their gender identity and/or sexuality.

Employee Counseling

Today, people are spending most of their waking hours at work and with work colleagues. Organizations today feel more responsible for bringing concepts of holistic wellbeing for their employee’s because,

1. Fit employees (Physically & Mentally) are more engaged, happy and productive for working towards the organizational business goals.
2. It also helps organizations to retain & motivate them for higher performance consistently, keeping hiring, training and replacements costs low.

Employee Counselling Solutions at Mind Celebrations

Mind Celebrations has a vision to create an emotionally safe world /organizations.

We recommend

1. To change the paradigm of Employee Counselling from being a reactive to proactive tool,
2. We encourage employees to get help preventively and build daily emotional fitness along with being better prepared for work challenges.
3. At Mind Celebrations, our communication is based on very simple principle of enjoying rituals of Mental Health on daily basis. Celebrations and Fun ways to build your organizations collective Mental Health. We changed the paradigm of mindfulness to mindfunness.

The global utilization of Employee Counseling, which is often packaged in Employee Assistance Programs (EAP’s) are very low at around 4.5% (as quoted by Centre for Workplace Mental Health). In Mind Celebrations, Employee Counseling is only initiated post a strong bond between the counselor or facilitator is created and trust is established to bring in higher utilization and impact.

With Pandemic impacting our personal and professional life, brining in grief, loss, financial disturbance, inability to help others Mind Celebrations is offering both Online (Virtual) & Offline (Physical) sessions for its clients 24×7 through its team of experts.

Some of the benefits of Employee Counseling offered through Mind Celebrations are –

1. For employees
   1. Develop sharper focus & productivity
   2. Higher energy & performance
   3. Belongingness at work place
2. For organizations
   1. Culture of Trust & Empathy
   2. Business Objectives & Goals achievement
   3. Higher Retention (lower hiring & training costs)

Dr Kanan Khatau & Gurdarshan Singh, authors of this article are Co-Founders of Mind Celebrations, a pioneering preventive Mental Healthcare initiative for organizations and their employees. To know more about Mind Celebrations, visit www.mindcelebrations.com and take your preventive mental health assessments today. They offer customized Employee Assistance Programs and Employee Counselling for organizations.