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 organisatoin 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.
Objective of Counselling
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 organisatoin. 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.
Forms of Counselling
Counselling may be formal or informal. Formal counselling implies the direct intention of the management to structure a counselling relationship between the employee and his supervisor or sometimes a counselling specialist with adequate professional training. Such counselling on a systematic and planned basis may take place at three levels.
• Supervisor’s counselling with his subordinates periodically,
• Professional counselling within the organisation by staff members of personnel department, and
• Counselling by psychiatrists from inside or outside the organisation.
Informal counselling is done in the natural course of human relations among individuals who have mutual confidence and respect for each other judgments. It takes place in the normal work situation without any predetermined schedule and is considered as a part of he routine duty of a manager. Quit often, the subordinates does not know or realize that counselling is taking place.
Techniques of Counselling
On the basis of techniques counselling could be
• Directive Counselling
• Non-directive Counselling
• Cooperative Counselling
Directive Counselling centre around the counselor. The counselor, after hearing the problems of an employee, decides what should be done and give advice and suggestion to him to resolve the problem. But directive counselling seldom succeeds, as people do not wish to take up advice normally, no matter how good it might be.
Nondirective Counselling is the process of skillfully listening the emotional problems of an employee, understand him and determine the course of action to be adopted to resolve his problem. It focuses on the counselee hence it is called ‘client centred’ ounselling. Professional counselors usually adopt this method of ounselling. The unique advantage of this type of counselling is its ability to cause the employees reorientation. The main stress is to ‘change’ the person instead of dealing with his immediate problem only. The non-directive counselor deals with respect the person so affected. He takes the person as best to solve his own problems and he facilitates the person to reach his goal.
Cooperative Counselling is the process in which both the councellor and client mutually cooperate to solve the problems of the client. It is not either wholly client centred nor wholly counselor centred but it is centred both councellor and client equally. It is defined as mutual discussion of an employee’s emotional problem to set up conditions and plans of actions that will remedy it. This form of counselling appears to be more suitable to managerial attitude and temperament in our country.
Among the three from of counselling, the advice offered in directive counseling considers the surface crises; the nondirective counselling goes to the underlining cause, the real crisis that leads the employee to understand his problem. It is thus suggested that nondirective to counselling is, probably, the best among the three forms.
Counselling Process
The counselling process, normally consists of the following stages:
Initiating
This involves developing mutual understanding openness and acceptance between counselor and counseled. This rapport building is essential to initiate the counselling.
Exploration
This involved understanding with the help of the counselling, the counsellee’s own situation, his feelings, his strengths and weakness, his problems and needs.
The councellor allows the counselee to talk about anything even apparently unrelated to the issue. It is important for the counselor to achieve a free flow of expression-often through rumblings – of the employee. The counselor will need an alert and receptive mind for this. The councellor, however, see to it that the councellor eventually concentrates his thoughts on his problem rather than stray away from it. The counselor 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.
Counselling and Industrial Relations
When employee are affected by job related and personal problems that very much affect the organizational welfare besides their own. Hence, if he problems are not identified in the initial stages itself and solved, they may assume a serious proportion and ultimately affect the employee and organisation resulting in poor industrial relations. Hence the organisatoins should take these problem seriously and solve them. If the problems are relating to technical or job related, the line manager knows well from his experience how and what changes he may suggest that may help restoration of employee’s effective performance. Concerning career problems the supervisors may refer such cases to the personnel specialists within the organisation. Again, it is the line supervisors who must create confidence on the minds of their subordinates that they can solve even the personal problems of their employees. The supervisors should also be aware of that personal and job related problems are largely inseparable and the employee brings his total personality to his work and hence the organizations should also help their employees to solve their personal problems to the extent possible through counselling.
Having understood the importance of counselling as a tool of solving the various problems of the employees and help them the maintain/ improve concentration in their work performance, now many organizations start adopting conselling practices and procedure to maintain better industrial relations.
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