The Value of Counsellors in Your Company

Keep Your Eye On The Job

Here are just a few reasons why hiring external counselling support for your business can be a great investment:

• Objective assessment of human resource, personal strengths and areas for growth
• Increase productivity and profit through improved working relationships
• Improve corporate morale and job performance
• Team building through training
• Improve group cohesiveness and thus, improve performance
• Assess job satisfaction, on an individual and group basis, and potential adjustments
• Coach/conduct a variety of workshops (e.g., how to cope with work-related stress)
• Address work conflict appropriately, effectively and in a timely fashion
• Decrease biases when restructuring work roles & responsibilities

Counsellors in the workplace have shown to reduce overall costs, while still being able to improve employees’ well being (allaboutcounselling.com).

An additional benefit for a company to hire professional, registered counsellors on their team is to effectively coach how to provide candid and constructive feedback to each other (cross-training culture). The thought of giving feedback constructively is often seen as a daunting task. Many employees may fear losing their jobs, being scrutinized or treated differently as a result of providing feedback and may simply just fear any form of confrontation altogether.

As a result, management may end up with numerous unresolved or poorly resolved issues with their staff. Employees can then bottle up their concerns, which can lead to:

• Increased work-related stress
• Inhibition to concentrate or remain focused with job responsibilities
• Decreased overall well being
• Increased health-related concerns (e.g., hypertension, insomnia)
• Increased conflict at home (displacement of the stress at work is very common).
• Emotional outbursts

The apprehension about providing feedback to others is often because people are concerned about communicating clearly and constructively without damaging the relationship. A workplace counsellor providing a non-judgmental and confidential forum can coach both management and front-line workers on how to provide constructive and candid feedback helping to create a workplace culture of openness and mutual respect.

Here are two starter tips when giving feedback: (1) offer a few words of encouragement and then describe what concerns you are observing, (2) communicate the impact of what you are observing, and 3) comment on the behavioural concerns and not about the person. To learn more, give us a call today!