Employee Counselling: Need and importance in the 21^st century workplace

Counselling is the particular relationship between people that leads to healing, growth and change to be autonomous and caring in living with oneself and others. Employee counselling is one of the most important tools we have to tackle some personal problems and develop the potentialities of employees at the workplace. In this regard, the caring and helping professionals have an important role to play. The mental health professionals are few in number, in all of India and they alone will not be able to deal with even a fraction of the problem. With some training in personal and professional growth many teachers, social workers, industrial and other administrators, hospital personnel can do unlimited good in preventing serious problems and promoting positive health and happiness among people who seek their help.

The present, study aims to understand the need and importance of employee counseling in the 21st century workplace as well as to know the challenges and current scenario of employee counseling. The study has specific objectives such as understanding of the effectiveness of employee counseling program, the role of the employee counselors, their approaches, common problems of employees in workplace, and challenges of employee counselling atthe workplace.

In present era of modernization and globalization the quality, competence, and characters of employee are most significant factors that influence the quality of work performance in the organization. Keeping in view these problems, our study focused on these issues and found that there is a greater need to deal effectively with these problems and provide them favorable environment for their healthy and peaceful work and family life. Therefore employee counseling in workplace is need of the hour.

Common problems of employees are issues pertaining to job performance, learning disability, depression, anxiety, behavior disorder, personality disorder and problems related to relationships, infatuation, absenteeism, drug addiction, excessive use of alcohol, love affair, family related problems etc. The challenges faced by counselor are issues related to dealing with such kind of complex problems, and administrators, issues related to maintaining confidentiality, maintaining a professional identity in organization, planning and executing the program in the workplace.

This study underlines a need for standard practices in employee counseling profession, better training to face the challenges and help the employee to help themselves. Therefore employee counseling in workplace is need of the hour.