Counselling - Features of Counselling - Counselling Process
Emotions are part of the nature of human beings and emotional upsets are part of their life. It is sometimes more disastrous to suppress emotions. The emotional problems affect the interest of the employees himself and the organisation in which he is working for. The problems may reduce their productivity, morale and increase absenteeism. Hence the managers should take steps to maintain a reasonable emotional balance of their employees and channelize their emotions on the constructive lines. The instrument with which the managers can achieve such balance is called counselling.
Counselling is a method of understanding and helping people who have technical, personal and emotional or adjustment problems that usually has emotional contents that an employee with the objective of reducing it so that performance is maintained at adequate level or even improved upon.
Features of Counselling
Counselling is interviewing the person being counselled and helping to solve his problems through human approach of sharing and guidance.
Counselling is sitting down in private setting for an open discussion with an employee. Sometimes it is to pay a sincere compliment, sometimes it is to solve a problem that is hurting productivity/effectiveness, sometimes it is because an employee violated your discipline line and you need to talk about improvement in his behavior.
It is communicating one to one, in private. It is interviewing- it's a two way dialogue and not one way sermonizing or advising.
It is encouraging the other person to to talk about himself so that the problem and it's reasons emerge clearly and solutions can be worked out.
In an organization, counselling can be done by the team leader, supervisor or manager or one can seek the expertise and assistance of an in-house or external professional counsellor.
Situations that Call for Counselling in an Organization
Given below is a partial indicative list of situations that call for counselling from a superior to his subordinate:
When an employee violates your standards.
When an employee is consistently late or absent.
When an employee’s productivity is down.
When one employee behaves in such a way that productivity of others is negatively affected.
When two employees have a conflict that is becoming public and it is affecting the work.
When you want to compliment an individual.
When you want to delegate a new task.
Employee Counselling in Maruthi Suzuki,s violence
On July 18 of 2012, Labour violence at the manufacturing plant had seen nearly 100 injured and killed of senior human resource manager by setting fire, following the instant company had decided lock-out in the view of safety and welfare of its employees. This serious dispute had created panic and psychological disturbance among employees, for this purpose Maruthi Suzuki decided to get psychologist and psychiatrics for counselling its injured employees and violence. The employee welfare team had setup to conduct the counselling sessions for the employees injured.
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Companies like Citigroup, Bharti Airtel and DLF have terminated its employees those who are in redundant jobs. To soften the termination issue theses companies took the help of counsellors to counsel.
Objectives of the Interview
The general objective of the manager in counselling sub-ordinates is to help the individual remain effective in his job and performance of his duties in the organization. The man purpose of counselling in industry is to help employees in overcoming their neurotic or emotionally based illness that accounts for a substantial part of employee absenteeism and turnover.
Counselling Process
The counselling process, normally consists of the following stages:
Initiating
This involves developing mutual understanding openness and acceptance between counsellor and counselled. This rapport building is essential to initiate the counselling.
Exploration
This involved understanding with the help of the counselling, the counselee's own situation, his feelings, his strengths and weakness, his problems and needs.
The counsellor allows the counselee to talk about anything even apparently unrelated to the issue. It is important for the counsellor to achieve a free flow of expression-often through rumblings – of the employee. The counsellor will need an alert and receptive mind for this. The counsellor, however, see to it that the counsellor eventually concentrates his thoughts on his problem rather than stray away from it. The counsellor has to help the counselee in concentrating more on the problem and getting deeper into it and to discover the basic problems by himself. Formulation of action plan This involved exploring possible solutions and formulating action plan for implementing them to make the counselee the normal person.
