Employee Counselling Literature Review

Employee Counselling

1. Introduction

Counselling is a wonderful twentieth-century invention. In this world of modernization and fierce competition, everyone is busy in adapting to the environment which is dynamic. People come across different types of experiences to cope with in their daily activities. More often, we get on with life, but sometimes we are at a standstill in our tracks by an incident or condition that we are unaware of and may not possess the resources to deal with it.

So, when these types of problems arise, we tend to find methods of dealing with in by communicating to family, friends, neighbors, priests or our family doctor. However, sometimes their advice is not enough, or we are not comfortable enough to share our problems.

(Burks and Stefflre 1979: 14)

2. Literature Review

2.1. Introduction

Employee counselling is a psychological health care intervention which can take many forms. It aims at assisting both the owner and worker by intervening with a dynamic problem-solving methodology to dealing with the problems at hand.

The costs to industry and commerce each year associated with employees’ poor psychological health are enormous. A significant proportion of the Gross National Product (GNP) of industrialized countries is lost each year through ill-health, particularly in respect of stress-related illness.

These costs increase substantially when lost productivity resulting from stress-related inefficiency and incompetence is taken into account. Stress-related incompetence is not inevitable though.

Employee counselling can help preventing the adverse consequences of stress both individually and ultimately at a structural level.

Organizations cannot afford to overlook the consequences associated with employees’ emotional

Most employees spend more than 50% of their waking hours at the work and its environment greatly impacts their performance and mental framework. It has been observed that this mental framework has a direct influence on their individual performance which eventually affects the organization as a whole. Thus it is important for an organization to identify the factors that have a drastic effect on the performance of an employee at the workplace and make suitable corrections.

The following are the factors that lead to poor performance of employees at the workplace:

1. Personality or Ego Clashes: This in general, is seen between two people with opposing personalities. The problem arises when there is mistrust between both the parties with respect to their motives and character.

2. Stress: The modern workplace is full of demands, deadlines and so on. There are employees who endure and perform under pressure while there are employees who surrender to this increasing pressure. Thus, an aggressive environment where the stress levels are high will prove unfavorable to employee