Unit 1 Corporate Counseling

Rohit Ramachandran
 Understanding Workplace Counseling
• Why?
Organization must facilitate employee empowerment through
education, counselling and information.
• High levels of stress today
• Employees afraid to take time off when sick
• Many suffer from presenteeism
• 70% of people feel more in jeopardy than they did two years ago
• 44% are afraid to criticize their bosses
Today’s workplace?
• Stress is a constant feature
• Twice the work in half the time
• Downsizing
• Massive redundancy
O’Leary (1993) and Cartright & Cooper
(1994)
• 1 in 5 working people suffer from mental illness (6 million people)
• 90 million working days are lost each year as a result of mental illness
• Half the employers felt that emotional and personal problems were to
blame
• Between 30 and 40 percent of all sickness from work involve mental
illness and emotional stress
• Alcohol Abuse estimated by Alcohol Concern to cost about 2 billion
pounds per annum, cost to industry is approximately 1 billion per annum
• Approximately 20 percent of any workforce are affected by personal
problems that IMPACT work performance
O’Leary (1993) and Cartright & Cooper
(1994)
• Employers should be closely involved in the physical and mental well-
being of employees as it makes both ethical and financial sense.
• While 94% of companies surveyed by the Confederation of British
Industry (CBI) in 1991 felt that mental health should concern them,
only 12 % actually had a policy in place.
• Ongoing legal cases against managers for mounting ‘unreasonable
stress’ has made employers more cautious to safeguard from further
litigation, usually in the form of stress-related claims.
O’Leary (1993) and Cartright & Cooper
(1994)
• What are the employers doing about it?
• Increasing counselling facilities
• Employee assistance programmes
• Workshops
• Training sessions
• Alcohol awareness
• Stop smoking campaign
• Stress management
• Taking care of your heart
 Why workplace counselling?
• Ethical compliance
• More productivity
• Less litigation
• Less compensation
• Anticipate risk and offer counselling services
• Transitions are stressful despite continuous organizational change
• Personal is professional
• Pfeiffer (1994) research showed that most important ingredient of successful
organization was care towards employees. There is a direct link between care for
people and drive for profit, which is a major factor in convincing employers to install
counselling services as a further way of managing their workforce constructively.
 Why workplace counselling?
• Counseling is also perceived as preventive, not just supportive for crisis
counselling.
• Counselors offer psychoeducation
• Training packages can forestall mental illness and injury
• Corporate Social Responsibility was the main reason why one installs EAP.
Wholeness approach needs to be adopted towards employees- physical,
mental, emotional and spiritual. Emphasis on one element is not enough.
• Counseling is also highly cost-effective. Pales in comparison to alcoholism,
absenteeism, stress, depression, broken relationships and day-to-day stressors.
• Counseling can also promote growth in an individual rather than just work with
or around deficiencies.
Cooper (Magnus, 1995) research
• 76% of employers see counselling as a caring facility
• 70% of employers expect counselling to help employees deal with
workplace change
• 57% of employers view counselling as a means of managing stress
 History of workplace counselling
• Three phases-
1. The human relationship era
2. Alcohol awareness
3. Internal and external counselling provision
1. The human relationship era
• Oberer and Lee (1986) trace the relationship between and industry and
management of resources to back in the early 19th century.
• By 1913, there were 2000 welfare workers in the industry (Carter, 1977)
• First counselling programme was initiated by the Ford Motor Company in
1914.
• Engineering Foundation of New York commissioned a research survey of
emotional problems among employees before 1920.
• 62% of employees were discharged because of social rather than
occupational incompetence.
• Metropolitan Life Insurance and R.H. Macey employed full-time psychiatrists.
2. The alcohol awareness stage of workplace
counselling
• Mayo was a key figure in researching employee needs, criticizing industry for not
paying adequate attention to the psychological needs of employees and himself
establishing a counselling service in 1936.
• In 1945, even before Carl Rogers outlined Client centred therapy, Dickson head of
counselling service at Mayo spoke of a counsellor being in charge of a territory of
300 employees.
• Counselor had to be free from activities that are incompatible with his position in
the organization.
• The counsellor has to be neutral.
• A session was referred to as an interview.
• Occasional nods, restating what was said, encouraging to re-examine train of
thought were the main techniques
2. The alcohol awareness stage of workplace
counselling
• 1936 -> program commenced
• 1940 -> 20 counsellors
• 1948 -> 55 counsellors
• Employee Assistance Program (1940) was coined by the National
Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
• Ex-alcoholics, psychiatrists, social workers, occupation and industrial
psychologists and personnel officers got involved to help others.
• EAP is a unified approach to intervention and assistance for a wide
variety of related human problems in the workplace.
• Name was changed from OAP (Occupational Alcohol Programme)
2. The alcohol awareness stage of workplace
counselling
Presnall saw the EAP as four-fold-
1. Do more about problems in the workplace.
2. Act upon the realization that the workplace is both a human-
problem breeder and a human-problem resolver.
3. Humanize the workplace.
4. Develop new work practices based on awareness that areas are
interrelated in the workplace, i.e. health wholeness, work,
relationships etc.
3. Internal and External counselling provision
• Expanded the scope beyond alcohol and drug problems
• Legal help
• Financial help
• Stress management
• Telephone Counselling
• Face to face counselling
3. Internal and External counselling provision
• By 1980, 1 million UK employees were covered by EAP
• Regardless, EAPs are highly subjective and there is little agreement on what
constitutes an overall programme.
• Each organization has their own needs and cultures for which EAP must be uniquely
customized.
• SonnenStuhl and Trice(1990) – “Job-based programs operating within a work
organization for identifying troubled employees, motivating them to resolve their
troubles and providing access to counselling or treatment for those employees who
need such services.”
• Management often wants EAPs to work with organization to prevent employees
from reaching a stage of requiring individual care.
• It is now moving from what is done to employees towards a more general concept of
EAP as creating organizational change.
3. Internal and External counselling provision
• EAPs are now connected to employee performance, management practice, style of
leadership to training for supervisors, to support at all levels and to training.
• Companies hire counsellors to work with staff, which is internal counselling. External
counselling provision is referring staff to counsellors in agencies outside which are in
contract with the company.
• Confidentiality is emphasized and wellbeing is viewed holistically.
• Counseling was deemed to be the most economical means of improving performance.
• Are stress-related illnesses valid grounds for litigation against employers?
• Will litigation replace pill-popping in regards to occupational stress?
• Employers have a duty to ensure that workplace is safe and healthy.
• Employers are obliged to assess the nature and scale of risks to health in the
workplace and base their control measures on it.
3. Internal and External counselling provision
Practical steps for employers to meet their legal duties in respect of stress-
1. Maintaining good management
2. Create an attitude to stress where individuals aren’t punished for
organizational issues
3. Ensuring that individuals know their jobs
4. Ensuring that individuals have the skills to do it
5. Setting up stress awareness and stress management courses
6. Aiding managers to work with their employees to get help for stress
7. Providing counselling services
8. Encouraging employees to consult doctors for help with stress
3. Internal and External counselling provision
Traditional programmes
Emphasis on alcoholism as the basis of the problem
Emphasis on supervisory referrals
Problems identified in the late stage of
development
Services offered by medical or alcohol specialists
Focus on troubled employees with job performance
problems
Confidentiality for referred employees
Contemporary programmes
Broad-brush approach – any appropriate service
Supervisory referral + self-referral + other-referral
Services offered at earlier stages of development
Services offered by generalist counsellors with
expertise in chemical dependency and other areas
Focus on both employees with work problems and on
employees/family members with no performance
problems
Confidentiality for referred employees, anonymity for
self-referred employees or family members
The many faces of workplace counselling
Five main approaches-
1. Organization employs both counsellor and worker
2. Counselor is employed by an EAP provider
3. Counselor is employed to work with consumers of organization
4. Counselor is employed to work with members of the public
5. Range of specialist services to other organizations and individuals
within organizations
 1. Organization employs
both counsellor and worker
• They are called in-house counsellors
• Both are employees paid by the same organization
1. Organization employs
both counsellor and worker
1. Organization employs
both counsellor and worker
2. Counselor is employed by an EAP provider
Organization makes a contract with EAP provider who employ or hire
counsellors as freelancers, full time or part time.
2. Counselor is employed by an EAP provider
 3. Counselor is employed to work
with consumers of organization

Some organizations employ counsellors to see those who use their

services.

Educational institutions
Hospitals
3. Counselor is employed to work
with consumers of organization
 4. Counselor is employed to work
with members of the public
Some organizations set up counselling provision for needy members of
the public. Often self-financing, sometimes within public services as
education or social work, this counselling targets particular groups in
the community like young people, children, abused women etc.

Corporate social responsibility

4. Counselor is employed to work
with members of the public
5. Range of specialist services to other
organizations and individuals within organizations
• Some organizations exist to provide a variety of services, one of which
is counselling, to other organizations. Counseling is often combined
with other services like outplacement counselling services, executive
search, career counselling etc.
5. Range of specialist services to other
organizations and individuals within organizations
 What is workplace counselling?
• Organization pays for counselling provision for its employees
• Dynamic between three participants -> employee, counsellor,
organization
What is workplace counselling?
What is workplace counselling?
What is workplace counselling?
Four main relationships at work within
overall system
Counselors need to take one of four stances
working with workplace clients
• Counselors work as if organization didn’t exist
• Counselors work as allies of the organization
• Counselors work as allies of the individual AGAINST the organization
• Counselors work at the interface between individual and organization
Criticisms of Workplace Counseling
• Counselors become enmeshed in the politics of the organization and used by factions
for their own ends.
• Individuals and departments definitely make capital out of owning or not owning the
counselling service.
• Human resource want counselling services within their department
• Occupational health wanted it to be located near medical department
• Territoriality can make counselling service an unwelcome competitor.
• Counseling may just be sanctioned apathy. The organization gets to stay as it is and
capitalize guilt-free given that they’ve invested in counselling rather than actually
ensuring work-life balance.
• Counseling may also be a way to shift the burden from organizational structure to the
individual who may be cracking under the strain.
Criticisms of Workplace Counseling
• There is also an argument that counselling is a form of systemic gaslighting, urging
the individual to (over?)adapt to the demands (or needs?) of the organization.
• Counseling offers an opportunity to corporates to relieve themselves of corporate
social responsibility.
• Most writing on stress emphasizes the individual’s responsibility for recognizing it
and managing it which takes away the focus from organizational responsibilities.
• All problems are individualized and decontextualized as if environment has no
influence on them.
• Workplace Counseling is a way of managing emotions where it could be viewed as
a method of organizational social control dictating to individual clients which
emotions are permissible and which emotions are not permissible in the
organization
Criticisms of Workplace Counseling
• There is a lot of anxiety that going for counselling will be seen as a weakness.
• Social justice theorists and public health professionals believe that emotions are to
be appropriately directed towards injustice.
• Justified emotions such as anger and resentment may be siphoned off leading to
emotional bypassing or spiritual bypassing.
• Sometimes there is underinvolvement in the organizational policies by counsellors
while other times there is overinvolvement in the organizational policies which
urges therapists to be hired based not on injustice sensitivity but on injustice
insensitivity.
• Deverall suggests that if 10% of personnel in an organization need counselling
then the organization itself is in need of help and that individual counselling may
be a diversion from real organizational problems
Criticisms of Workplace Counseling
 Stress and Workplace Counseling
• What exactly is reasonable stress?
• Should PTSD be part of it?
• Is stress counselling about reducing stress, managing stress or
tolerating stress?
• When do counsellors involve in the organization?
• When do you perceive something as an organizational issue?
• When do you break confidentiality without permission?
• When do you tell on the organization?
 Stress and Workplace Counseling
• Male client drinks on the job – report?
• Female client made a mistake and her boss is mistakenly fired –
report?
• Manager informs that lots of people will be fired in a month including
employee who is having financial difficulties – report?
• Three employees complain about manager’s sexual harassment –
report?
• An employee in relationship with another employee cheating –
inform?
Case discussions
Issues in ethical decision making
“Counsellor in such circumstances needs ‘the rational and intuitive
perceptiveness necessary for straddling the worlds of business and
mental health.” – Puder (1983:96)
1. Making ethical decisions by intuition is not sufficient due to
contamination by heuristics
2. Supervision needs to be mandated and peer discussion highly
important along with personal work
3. Overfocus on clinical details and underfocus on ethical complexities
4. Excess individualism and less collectivism
5. Organizations tend to win
 Approaches to ethical decision making
• How do you deal with conflicting values?
• What are the short-term effects of policies?
• What are the long-term effects of policies?
• How to manage divided loyalties?
 Certain important questions to consider
• Reach out and touch the client?
• When do you refer due to excess transference?
• How do you manage counter-transference?
• How do you assess your competency?
• When is the right time to terminate?
• What is your unwritten personal standard, and how is it influencing
your assessment?
• How can you be an interface between individual and organization
despite being a member of the organization?
Making ethical decisions in the workplace
Making ethical decisions in the workplace
Rest’s (1984:20) model of the four components involved in ethical
decisions-
1. Ethical Sensitivity
2. Making an ethical decision
3. Implementing the decision
4. Living with the decision
 1. Ethical Sensitivities
• Interpret behaviour and its effect on others
• Ethical watchfulness, termed by Pryor (1989)
• Be familiar with ethical codes and standards
• Foresee ethically unclear possibilities before they occur
• Keep an eye on new techniques that may involve ethical dilemmas
• Examine legal, ethical and professional allegiances
• Give oneself TIME to think through ethically uncertain situations
 1. Ethical Sensitivities
• Should counsellor see employee’s wife who is also employee?
• Should counsellor intervene on behalf of employee?
• Should counsellor attend a disciplinary meeting with the organization?
• What about suicidal ideation?
• What about violent thoughts?
• Some counsellors are hypersensitive while other counsellors are
hyposensitive to ethical issues.
• What stops a counsellor from acting in the face of an unethical situation?
 1. Ethical Sensitivities
• Counselors exploit the client with excessive familiarity, non-clinical business matters, breaches of
confidentiality, satisfaction of their own needs, impressing the client, asking favours of clients, being
lax and being sadistic
• Carroll (1995a) suggests the following to increase ethical sensitivity-
1. Case reviews
2. Identify ethical issues
3. Read ethical codes and related literature
4. Case vignettes
5. Explore value issues
6. Clarify and confront your own values
7. Create awareness about power in counselling
8. Review critical incidents within counselling
9. Evaluate ethical frameworks and theories
 2. Making an ethical decision
• Assess the best course of action for this individual in this organization
not what is ideal (context, role, consequence)
• Weigh the merits of various courses of action and decide on one
• Remember the possibility of others discovering that you know this
information, what are you at risk of?
 3. Implementing the decision
• Ethical decisions may conflict with career, friendship, loyalty etc.
• Organization may need the manager more, but you have to support
the employee if they are being sexually harassed or physically abused.
• Questions to ask during implementation-
1. What steps need to be taken to implement the decision?
2. Which people are involved and who needs to be told what?
3. What restraints are there NOT to implement the ethical decision?
4. What support is needed to implement and live with the results?
 4. Living with the decision
• Consider hospitalization during suicidality
• Consider POCD mandatory reporting
• Consider POCSO mandatory reporting
• Do I feel anxiety about my final decision?
• Do I feel guilty?
• Do I want forgiveness?
• What are the legal risks of forgiveness?
• How do you overcome guilt without forgiveness?
• Human fallibility or personal deficiency?
• Can this be viewed as a learning experience?
• What does your professional support need to tell you to put you at ease?
• What does your personal support need to tell you to put you at ease?
Models of workplace Counseling
 Models of Workplace Counseling
1. Counselling-orientation models
2. Brief-therapy models
3. Problem-focused models
4. Work-oriented models
5. Manager-based models
6. Externally-based models
7. Internally-based models
8. Welfare-based models
9. Organizational-change models
 1. Counselling orientation models
• Characterized by its use of counselling approach to employees.
• Adapt counselling theories, skills and practice to workplace counselling
• EAP counsellors and in-house counsellors both tended to become eclectic
in their styles according to Research in US and Britain in the ‘90s.
• Rogerian Counseling is useful in creating new relationships and its use of
core conditions but not useful in problem solving due to open-ended
contracts.
• Most counsellors apply their counselling theory in individual contexts as if
there were no difference in the organizational setup.
 2. Brief-therapy models
• This is the norm in employee counselling.
• EAP practitioners contract for around six to eight sessions with clients.
• EAPA UK Standards of Practice and Professional Guidelines for Employee Assistance
Programmes (1995) defines an EAP counsellor as: “The work of an EAP counsellor is that
of crisis intervention, assessment and short-term counselling of the individual clients who
are referred to the programme.”
• Its preference is guided more by the economics of the situation than by the client’s need.
• Is it chosen to save money or to bypass emotions or to hire fewer counsellors or to take
less responsibility or to prioritize role fulfilment over self congruence?
• Steve De Shazer devised Solution Focused Brief Therapy
• Is there fear that clients will abuse counselling provision?
• How does discussing interpersonal conflicts directly benefit the organization? Is the
organization a caretaker of the client’s life or recharger of client’s role?
 3. Problem focused models
• Work with immediate problems people bring
• Formulate problem -> Generate solution -> Action plan
Nelson-Jones developed DASIE-
1. Develop the relationship, identify and clarify problems
2. Assess problem and redefine in skills terms
3. State working goals and plan interventions
4. Intervene to develop self-helping skills
5. End and consolidate self-helping skills
• Most problems brought to helpers are educational in nature
• Uses immediacy
• Be as effective as quickly as possible
• More effective in workplace than emotion focused approaches
 4. Work-oriented models
• Centred solely on issues blocking an individual in his or her work
• Counseling is restricted to issues interfering with effective employment
• Only focuses on workplace problems and not the other areas
• Yeager (1983) believes that approaching the case from a traditional
therapeutic criteria of wellness is inappropriate. The corporate counsellor
focuses on ‘performance and productivity.’ Corporate counselling is not a
place for clients to self-actualize. The main job is to fix the performance
problem in a minimalist way and to FIX IT FAST!
• This is an attractive counselling model for managers who want value for
money and prioritize organization welfare. However, the boundary between
personal and professional is often blurred.
 5. Manager-based models
• Managers are perceived as quasi-counsellors
• There is an argument that the manager already has an established alliance with the
employees and so is the right person to do it
• Criticism is that there are dual relationships and that may violate the value of non-
maleficence
• Distinguish between CONDUCTING formal professional counselling and POSSESSING
informal counselling skills
• Legislation in the US forbids managers to enter into counselling with their
subordinates
• Regardless, some training skills may help managers see early signs of disturbance and
no doubt provides valuable aids in their managerial and personal roles
• Understand limitations of counselling role
6. Externally based models
6. Externally based models
7. Internally based models
 8. Welfare-based models
• Welfare officers are hired to fulfil several tasks depending on the client’s needs (Civil service and
Police):
1. Befriending
2. Information giving
3. Advocate
4. Home visiting during sickness
5. Giving legal advice
6. Giving financial advice
7. Advising on a range of topics
8. Counselling
• Tend to be social work based
• Can provide a range of interventions
• Limitations depend on the abilities to work across roles
 9. Organizational-change models
• Counseling is targeted at the organizational level
• Integrate counselling into organizational growth, development and
transition
• Three important questions
A. How can counselling change organizational culture?
B. What are the parallel processes in organizations?
C. What is moving upstream helping?
 A. How can counselling
change organizational culture?
• All relationships are bi-directional
• Individuals, teams and departments deal with others as they have
been dealt with, i.e. they pass on the relationship either to their
customers or their bosses
• All it takes is one person to contest the myths and assumptions of the
organization
• Interpersonal skills, client-centred orientation, flexibility with
structure, faith in people and creativity can totally change the kind of
employee you have, which automatically changes the organization
 Ways in which counselling can be used
as a form of organizational change
1. Providing a forum
2. Moving back to the organization to set up training
3. Consulting with managers
4. Managing individual and organizational transitions
5. Helping with bad news
6. Looking after those who feel redundant
7. Modelling professional relationships
8. Empowering individuals and groups
9. Creating awareness of individual differences
10. Teach about the value of contexts
11. Assess and understand individual, group and organizational dynamics
 1. Providing a forum

• People are held space for, listened to, trusted and respected to make
life-growing decisions
• Presenting the ‘people’ side of a workplace is essential
• Humanize the workplace
• Practice the necessary vaues
 2. Moving back to the organization
to set up training

• Work on underdeveloped management or ineffective systems

• Training in health related issues – stress management, relaxation,
time management etc.
 3. Consulting with managers
• Types of employees according to Egan – Good, bad, ugly, ambiguous
• When managers understand different personality styles, they may be
able to adopt a different relational style for each person.
• Counsellors can train managers and directors to work more effectively
with their teams and departments.
• Create more efficient subsystems within organizations that can
facilitate transition and change
 4. Managing individual and organizational transitions

• Counsellors are adept at handling change.

• Counsellors have been compared to mid-wives that facilitate new births,
i.e. novel beginnings.
• Counsellors understand the difficulties of letting go, confusion about the
change process and difficulty of integrating a new way of being into an old
lifestyle.
• In the workplace today, change is a matter of course rather than exception
• Of all the characteristics mined from studies on people who make good
counsellors, the one consistent feature was the ability to deal with
ambiguity.
 5. Helping with bad news
• Giving bad news has become commonplace in organizations
• Poorly done by managers who feel guilty about doing it
• Managers tend to lack skills in communication
• Managers lack competencies in holding space for employee’s
emotional reactions
• New beliefs can be instilled in the organization, “We don’t deny bad
news, but instead we give this news clearly and help our employees
deal with it.”
6. Looking after those who feel redundant

• Counsellors are aware of the damage done to long-serving, dedicated

employees by the way they have been made redundant, and how
little help is given at the time, neither psychologically nor emotionally.
7. Modelling professional relationships
• Respect
• Compassion
• Concern
• Boundary maintaining
• Professional consistency
• Challenge with care
• Bring out unused potential
8. Empowering individuals and groups
• Help individuals access their own power to solve their problems
• Use your power effectively and efficiently
• Teach managers of groups when to be non-directive, when to be
facilitative and when to be challenging
• Help clients build autonomy, assertiveness, flexibility and decision-
making
9. Creating awareness of individual differences

• People are simultaneously similar and different

• Gender, age, sexual orientation, race, culture, religion… they make us
aware of the richness and diversity of human life
• Different people have different needs
• Workplaces tend to negate individual needs and see people as
‘workers’ or ‘employees’
 10. Teach about the value of contexts
• Contexts give meaning
• Contextual issues give insight into what’s happening
• Systemic understanding help us see our interpersonal processes
• Change in one section affects change in another section of
organization
 11. Assess and understand individual,
group and organizational dynamics

• Most corporate counsellors tend to underestimate their abilities regarding bringing about
organizational change
• Psychodynamic concepts can facilitate organizational change
• Cole (1988) has suggested a five-stage model connecting counselling and organizational
change
1. Phase 1: Interview employees with the purpose of seeing how their usefulness can be
increased
2. Phase 2: Individual counselling for managers
3. Phase 3: Influence psychological tone of organization through small group meetings
4. Phase 4: Team building
5. Phase 5: Cultural change programme for managers to help them build an environment
where employees could be strengthened
 B. Parallel process
• Also known as reflection process, mirroring and parallel re-enactment
• Aspects of one relationship are expressed in another relationship
• Relationship between staff and customers may repeat in relationship between staff and management
• It is a form of transference -> an unconscious process, unidirectional and not usually beneficial to either
relationship
• It is caused by displacement
• It happens when word cannot be used -> people act out what they cannot speak of. If manager is aggressive
with an employee then the employee becomes aggressive with a client.
• It is a form of adapting to aggressive situations
• It is a form of hiding anxiety, concealment feels safer to communication
• It usually happens when there is an inequality in power
• A skilful and kind encounter between an employee and a customer is a microcosm of how the employee
themselves has been treated, which, in turn, is part of a more general attitude towards empowering cabin
crews to serve customers better
• Unconsciously, individuals and groups treat each other as they have been treated, be it care or abuse.
 C. Moving Upstream
• Counsellors are not socially minded enough
• It is not about working only with organization or only with individual. The objective is to
replace either/or thinking with yes, and
• Upstream is moving from individual to organization, working with systems who have
harmed individuals
• Downstream is moving from organization to individual, working with those that have
been harmed by systems
• Organizations were rated on their drive for profit and care for people, and predictably
the former greatly outweighed the latter.
• When and where does the organization become responsible & how much?
• Why is fault individualized when something happens to them?
• Why do we seek explanation for pain within people rather than between people?