Diamonds?? Yes.. Diamonds...
When a diamond is dug out from a mine, its appearance is not eye-catching. It is dirty and not shimmering but still it is tremendously valuable. But when a talented diamond cutter polishes the diamond it starts to glow and glimmer. And now the value of the diamond is countless.
The human resources of your organizations are similar to the diamonds. Even you don’t “polish” them they are extremely valuable. But if you help them to glow, their value will get increased countlessly.
Counseling plays a vital role in allowing the employees to ‘glow’ when they are in awkward situations. If we define employee counseling, counseling is a therapeutic process of providing help and support to face and sail through difficult times in the career as well as the life. It helps the counselee to see the things in different unseen perspectives and facilitate them to draft their own action plans.
The life is not a bed of roses. At some points of a person’s life time, various problems may arise. The problems might be either work related or personal. When it starts to affecting and influencing negatively to their performance, the counseling comes into the play. Counseling is the process of guiding, advising, sharing and helping the employees to resolve their problems when the requirement arises. Sometimes the counseling is considered as an activity that should be conducted by a practitioner specialized in counseling but there should be a counselor in every manager.
What makes the diamonds hazy?
There are so many factors that can make our diamonds hazy. They might be work related and sometimes personal. Unrealistic targets, Excessive workload, lack of awareness about the organizational policies and the procedures, performance lagging with respect to the peers, slipping deadlines, unbearable level of responsibility, lack of team spirit, Interpersonal relationship issue with peers, superiors and subordinates and problems in adjusting to the organizational culture are the examples to the work related forces that makes the stress on employees.
In the other hand an employee cannot expect 100% stress free environments anywhere so they have to adapt the changes and work accordingly. (Sometimes we call this, personality) And these problems might be accompanied by some other personal problems such as family problems and problems in self-confidence. When this happens the employee may show degraded performance and less attention on the work, that might affect the useful output towards the employer’s cause.
Let’s employ a diamond cutter
The Counselor is similar to a ‘diamond cutter’ in organizational perspective. As a diamond cutter polishes the uncut diamond, make it sparkle and increase the value of a diamond, a counselor can increase the value of your human capital.
How do the diamonds get more valuable?
- Counseling improves customer care and the better relationship with the stakeholders such as clients and suppliers. This makes the interested parties happy so your business relationships will get stronger resulting a higher customer retention and significant improvement in profit.
- Counseling reduces the impacts due to illnesses and absenteeism. There will be no extra costs due to employee substitutions, sick pay, sickness cover and overtime.
- Counseling makes the employees happy (again). When your employees are happy they like to be with you. So the employee turnover will get reduced.
- Systematic counseling makes the employees motivated. As a result they will commit to their responsibilities so you will observe an increment of quality of service they deliver.
- Counseling makes a sense of care in your employees’ minds. They will feel safe and cared by the management. So they will react in more graceful manner when a dispute occurs.
- Counseling improves the relationship between the employees and the managers. The employees become more open and comfortable with their managers. In any workplace there are very innovative people so you will receive many innovative ideas from employees. If your firm is innovative then you are ready to breach the business barriers.
- Counseling makes the employees to love their job and the organization. When they love the organization they tend to comply with their legal duties. So the losses due to illegal and fraudulent activities get down. You can save some money which you have to pay in purpose of monitoring the employees.
