By Cemre ATESIN * * * * * * * * * * * Types of Counseling

1
STRESS AND COUNSELING

• By Cemre ATESIN

2
What Stress Is??

• Strees is the general term applied to the
  pressures people feel in life. The presence of
  strees at work is almost inevitable in many jobs.
  However, individual differences account for a
  wide range of reaction to stress

3
Stress When it becomes excessive, employees
develope various syptoms of strees that can harm
their job performance and health

• Physiological Ulcers, Digestive problems,
  Headaches, High blood pressure, Sleep
  disruption.
• Psychological Emotional instability, Moodiness,
  Nervousness and tension, Chronic
  worry, Depression, Burnout.
• Behavioral Excessive smoking,Abuse of alchol or
  drugs, Absenteeism, Aggression, Safety
  problems, Performans problems.

4
Extreme Products of Stress

• Stress can be either temporary or long-term,
  either mild or severe. If stress is temporary and
  mild, most people can handle it or at least
  recover from is effects rather quicly.

5
Extreme Products of Stress

• Burnout The human body cant instantly rebuilt
  its ability to cope with stress once its
  depleted. People become physically and
  psychologically weakened from trying to combat
  it. This condion is called burnout.

6
Extreme Products of Stress

• Trauma Another severe product of stress is
  trauma, occurs following a major threat to ones
  security. The event could be a natural disaster,
  an organizational crisis, dramatic employee abuse
  by the employer, or personal job loss.
• One promlematicdisorder is called workplace
  trauma. Attitudinal clues to workplace trauma
  include severe moodiness, concentration
  difficulties, and alienation, in addition to the
  more distinctive behaviors of tardiness,
  absenteeism, and accident-proneness.

7
A common source of workplace trauma is sudden job
loss, with its potentially crushing effect on
ones self-esteem. The individual impact was
often magnified by two factors the lack of
warning and the lack of insularity felt by even
high-performing employees.Some experience layoff
survivors sickness, with feelings of
uncertainty, anger, guilt, and distrust. They are
simultaneously glad to have a job and guilty that
their workmates were displaced. In the meantime
the job pressures on them often increase
dramatically as they try to shoulder the tasks of
former colleagues. They also wonder, Will i be
the next to be cut?
8
Another source of trauma is to witness workplace
violence. Sometimes a trouble employee takes
dramatic and harmful physical action against
coworkers, managers or company property. These
violent, anger-based acts can include unprovoked
fights, destruction of property or use of weapons
to harm others.Any person who witness violence,
receiver injury from it or lives under the fear
of repeated future violence may suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder. The shock of
sudden and dramatic violent incidents often
produces immidiate stress-related syptoms. More
significantly, the effects of these traumatic
crises may last for years and require lengthy
treatment.
9
Even more important than detecting stress,
burnout and trauma is its prevention.For
example, the U.S. Postal Service has established
a crisis management plan that focuses on five
areas1-Careful selection of new
employees2-Zero tolerance policy to deal with
aberrant behavior3-Improvement of the work
culture4-Mandatory training for managers to help
them spot potential problems5-Threat assesment
process that is automatically implemented after
an employee is dismissed.As a result, actual
assaults have dropped sharply and employee fears
about violence have been cut in half.
10
Causes of Stress

• An important first step in prevention is to
  examine and understand the causes of stress.
  Conditions that tend to cause stress are called
  stressors. Although even a single stressor may
  cause major stress, usually stressors combine to
  pressure an employee in a variety of ways until
  stress develos.
• The major sours of employee stress are evenly
  divided between organizational factors and the
  nonwork environment.
• To control stress, then, organizations, usually
  begin by exploring its job-related causes.

11
Job-Related Causes of Stress

• Almost any job condition can cause stress,
  depending on an employees reaction to it. For
  example, one employee will accept a new work
  procedure and feel little or no stress, while
  another experiences overwhelming pressure from
  the same task. Part of the difference lies in
  each employees ezperiences, general outlooks and
  expectations, which are all internal factors.
• Work overload and time deadlines put employees
  under pressure and lead to stress. Often these
  pressures arise from management and a poor
  quality of management are an automatic supervisor
  , an insecure job climent, lack of control over
  ones own job and inadequate authority to match
  ones responsibilities.

12
-Work overload-Time pressures-Poor quality of
supervision-Insecure job climate-Lack of
personal control-Inadequate authority to match
responsibilities-Role conflict and
ambiguity-Differences between company and
employee values-Change of any type,especially
when it is major or unusually -Frustration-Tecno
logy with training or support
13
Role conflict and ambiguity are also related to
stress. In situation of this type, people have
different expectations of an employees
activities on a job, so the employee does not
know what to do and cant meet all expectations.
In addition since the job often is poorly
defined, the employee has no official model on
which to depend.A further cause of stress lies
in differences between company values and ethical
practices. Substantial differences can lead to
significant mental stress as an effort is made to
balance the requirements of both sets of
values.Some jobs produse more stress than
others. Those which involve rotating shift work,
machine-paced tasks, routine and repetitive work
or hazardous environments are assosiated with
greater stress. Workers who spend many hours
daily in front of computer screens also report
high stress levels. Evidence also indicates that
the sources of stress differ by organizational
level.
14
Middle managers may experience stress when their
job security is threatened by news of impending
corporate downsizings. Workers are more likely to
experience the stressors of low status, lack of
preceived control, resource shortages and the
demand for a large volume of error-free work.A
related source of stress that affect many
employees is worry over their financial
well-begin. This situation can arise when
cost-saving technology is introduced, contract
negotiations begin or the firms financial
performance suffers. Clearly, there are numerous
and powerful force at work that can contribute to
the feeling of stress.
15
Frustration

• Another cause of stress is Frustration. It is a
  result of a motivation begin blocked to prevent
  one from reaching a desired goal. These reaction
  to frustration are known as defense mechanisms,
  because you are trying to defend yourself from
  the phyhological effects of the blocked goal.
• The situation is more more serious when there is
  a long-run frustration such as blocked
  opportunity for promotion. Then you have to live
  with the frustration day after day. It begins to
  build emotional disorders that interfere with
  your ability to function effectivly.

16
Frustration

• Types of Reactions

• One of the most common reactions to frustration
  is aggression. Whenever people are aggressive,it
  is likely that they are reflectng frustrations
  that are upsetting them. Additional reactions to
  frustration include apathy, withdrawal,
  regression, fixation,physical disorder and
  substitute goals.
• You also may develop a physical disorder such as
  an upset stomach or choose a substitute gaol,
  such as becoming the leader of a powerful
  informal group in office politics. All of these
  are possible reaction to frustration.

17
Source of FrustrationAlthough management can be
the source of frustration, it ia only one of
several sources. Also can be frustrated by the
work itself such as a part that does not fit or a
machine that breaks down. Even the environment
such as a rainy day may prevent you from doing
the work you intended.Some research suggests
that it is the little things called hassles,
rather than major life crises that produce
frustration. Hassles are conditions of daily
living that are perceived to threaten ones
well-being. They have been found to be related to
both symptoms of ill health and levels of
absenteeism.The most frequent hassles include
having too many things to do,losing items, being
interrapted and having to do unchallenging work.
Such as dealing with problems of aging parents,
having insufficient personal energy. It is
possible that none of these hassles alone will
cause the average person to become frustrated.
However, the cumulative effects of multiple
hassles may well result in a feeling of unwelcome
stress.
18
Frustration and Management Practice

• Motivation is lacking then very little
  frustration is likely to develop. One implication
  is that when management attempts to motivate
  employees strongly, it also should be prepared to
  remove barriers and help prepare the way for
  employees to reach their goal.

19
Stress and Job Performance

• Stress can be either helpful or harmful to job
  performance, depending on its level. When there
  is no stress, job challenges are absent and
  performance tends to be low. As stress increases,
  performance tends to increase, because stress
  helps a person call up recources to meet job
  requirements. Constructive stress is a healthy
  stimulus that encourages employees to respond to
  challenges. Eventually, stress reaches a plateau
  that corresponds approximately with a persons
  top day-to-day performance capability. At this
  point additional stress tends to produce no more
  improvement.
• Finally, if stress becomes too great, it turns
  into a destructive force. Performance beging to
  decline at some point because excess stress
  interferes with performance. An employee loses
  the ability to cope she or he becomes unable to
  make decisions and exhibits erratic bahavior. If
  stress increases to a breaking point, performance
  becomes zero the employee has beakdown, becomes
  too ill to work, is fired, quits or refuses to
  come to work to face the stress.

20
Stress Vulnerability

• Stress Threshold

• Perceived Control

• Worker vulnerability to stress is a function of
  both internal and external stressors. One
  internal factor is an employees stress
  threshold. Some people have a low threshold and
  the stress of even relatively small changes or
  disruptions in their work routines causes a
  reduction in performance. Others have a high
  threshold staying cool, calm and productive
  longer under the same conditions.

• The second internal factor affecting employee
  stress is the amount of perceived control they
  have over their work and working conditions.
  Empoyees who have a substantial degree of
  independence, autonomy and freedom to make
  decisions seem to handle work pressures better.

21
Type A and Type B People

• Type A People

• Type B People

• They are aggresive and competitive, set high
  standarts are impatient with themselves and
  others and thrive under constant time pressures.

• They appear more relaxed and easygoing. They
  accept situations and work withing them rather
  than fight them competitively. Type B people are
  especially relaxed regarding time pressures, so
  they are less prone to have problems associated
  with stress.

22
Approaches to Stress Management

• Both organizations and individuals are highly
  concerned about stress and its effects. In
  attempting to manage stress, they have three
  broad options prevent or control it, escape from
  it or learn to adapt to it (handle its symptoms).
• These steps are aimed at reducing or eliminating
  stressors for employees. Some employees can
  escape stress by requesting job transfers,
  finding alternative employment, taking early
  retirement or acquiring assertiveness skill that
  allow them to confront the stressor.

23
Social Support

• Some people experience stress because they are
  detached from the wold around them they lack
  warm interpersonal relationships. Individuals
  with driving ambition and strong need for
  independence may fail to develop close
  attachments to frinds and collegues. To achieve
  their lack of social attachments may result in
  anger, anxiety and loneliness all producing
  stress in their lives.
• Social support is the network of helpful
  activities, interactions and relationships that
  provides an employee with the satisfaction of
  important needs. There are four types os support
  in a total network instrumental, informational,
  evaluative and emotiona.

24
Relaxation

• Some employees have turned to various means of
  mental relaxation to adjust to the stresses in
  their lives. Patterned after the practice of
  meditation, the relaxation responce involves
  quite, concentrated inner thought in order to
  rest the body physically and emotionally. It
  helps remove people temporarily from the
  stressful world and reduce their symptons of
  stress. The ideal ingredients of this relaxation
  effort involve
• -A confortable position in a relatively guiet
  location.
• -Closed eyes and deep, confortable breaths
• -Repetition of a peaceful word or focus on a
  pleasant mental image
• -Avoidance of distracting thoughts and negative
  events
• -Soothing backround music

25
Biofeedback Sabbaticals

• A different approach for working with stress is
  biofeedback, by which people under medical
  guidance learn from instrument feedback to
  influence symptoms of stress, such as increased
  heart rate or severe headaches.

• Whereas relaxation and biofeedback are methods
  for coping with stress, sometimes it is wisest to
  at least temporarily remove yourself from it.
  Some employers, recognazing this need for
  employees to escape, have created programs
  allowing sabbatical leaves to encourage stress
  relief and personal education. Some sabbaticals
  provide unpaid time off, others give partially
  paid leaves and a few continue full pay while
  employeea are away. Most employees return
  emotional refreshed, feel rewarded and valued by
  their employees.

26
Personal Wellness

• In general, here is a trend toward in-house
  programs of preventive maitenance for personal
  wellness that are based on research in behavioral
  medicine. Corporate wellness centers may include
  disease screening, health education and fitness
  centers. Health care specialists can recommend
  practices to encourage changes in lifestyle, such
  as breathing regulation, muscle relaxation,
  positive imagery, nutrition management and
  exercise, enabling employees to use more of their
  full potential. Clearly a preventive approach is
  preferable for reducing the cause of stress,
  althought coping methods can help employees adapt
  to stressors that are beyond direct control.

27
Employee Counseling

• What Counseling is?
• Counseling is discussion with an employee of a
  problem that usually has emotional content in
  order to help the employee cope with it better.
  Counseling seeks to improve employee mental
  health and well-being. Good mental health means
  that people
• 1-Feel comfortable about themselves,
• 2-Right about other people,
• 3-Able to meet the demands of life.

28
Counseling may be performed by both professionals
and nonprofessionals.Counseling usually is
confidential so that employees will feel free to
talk openly about their problems. It also
involves both job and personal problems, since
both types of problems may affect an employees
performance on the job.
29
Need for Counseling

• The need for counseling arises from a varienty of
  employee problems, including stress. When these
  problems exist, employees benefit from the
  understanding and guidance that counseling can
  provide.
• Most problems that require counseling have some
  emotional content. Emotions are a normal part of
  life. Nature gave people their emotions and these
  feeling make people human. One the other hand,
  emotions can get out of control and cause workers
  to do things that are harmful to their own best
  interests and those of the firm. They may leave
  their jobs because of triflinf conflicts that
  seem large to them or they may undermine morale
  in their departments. Managers want their
  employees to maintain good mental health and to
  channel their emotional along constraction lines
  so that they will work together effectively.

30
What Counseling Can Do?The general objectives
of counseling are to help employees grow in
self-confidence, understanding, self-control and
ability to work effectivey.The counseling
objective is achieved through one or more of the
following counseling functions. The six
activities performed by counseling.
31
1-Advice 2-Reassurance

• Many people view counseling as primarily an
  advise-giving activity but in reality this is
  only one of several functions that counseling can
  perform. The giving of advise requires a
  counselor to make judgments about a counselees
  problems and to lay out a course of action.

• Counseling can provide employees with
  reassurance, which is a way of giving them
  courage to face a problem or a feeling of
  confidence that they ae pursuing a suitable
  course of action.
• One trouble with reassurance is that the
  counselees do not always accept it. They are
  smart enough to know that the counselor cant
  know that the problem will come out all right.

32

• 3-Communication

• 4-Release of Emotional Tension

• Counseling can improve both upward and
  downward communication. In an upward direction,
  it is a key for employees to express their
  feeling to management.
• Counseling also achieves downward communication
  because counselors help interpret company
  activities to employees as they discuss problems
  related to them.

• An important function of nearly all
  counseling is release of emotional tension this
  release is sometimes called emotional catharsis.
  People tend to get an emotional release from
  their frustrations and other problems whenever
  they have an opportunity to tell someone about
  them
• They are more relaxed and their speech is
  more coherent and rational.

33

• 5-Clarified Thinking

• 6-Reorientation

• The case of Irwin also illustrates another
  function of counseling, that of clarified
  thinking.
• Clarified thinking tends to be a normal result of
  emotional release but a skilled counselor can aid
  this prosess. In order to clarify he counselee
  what is right. The result of any clarified
  thinking is that a person is encouraged to accept
  responsibility for emotional problems and to be
  more realistic in solving them.

• Another function of counseling is reorientation
  of the counselee. This is more than mere
  emotional release or clear thinking about
  problem. Reorientation involves a change in the
  employees psychic self through a change in basic
  goals and values.
• The managers job is to recognize those in need
  of reorientation before their need becomes severe
  so that they can be referred to proffissional
  help in time for successful treatment.

34
Types of Counseling

• Directive Counseling

• Nondirective Counseling

• Directive counseling is the process of
  listening to an employees problem, deciding with
  the employee what should be done and then telling
  and motivating the employee to do it. Directive
  counseling mostly accomplishes the counseling
  function of advice but it also may reassure,
  communicate, give emotional release and clarify
  thinking.

• Nondirective (client-centered) counseling is at
  the opposite end of the continuum. It is the
  process of skillfully listening to and
  encouraging a counselee to explain troublesome
  problems, understand them and determine
  appropriate solutions. It focuses on the
  counselee rather than on the counselor as judge
  and adviser thus it is client-centered. Managers
  can be use the nondirective approachhowever ,
  care should be taken to make sure that managers
  arent so oversold on it that they neglect their
  normal directive leadership responsibilities.

35
Use By Professionals

• Professional counselors usually practice some
  form of nondirective counseling and often
  accomplish four of the six counseling functions.
  Communication occurs both upward and downward
  through the counselor. Emotional release takes
  place even more effectively than with directive
  counseling and clarified thinking tends to
  follow. The unique advantage of nondirective
  counseling is its ability to couse the employees
  reorientation.
• Profissional counselors treat each counselee as a
  social and organizational equal. They primarily
  listen in a caring and supportive fashion and try
  to help the counselee discover and follow
  improved courses of action.

36

• Participative Counseling

• A Contingency View

• Nondirective counseling of employees is limited
  because it requires professional counselors and
  is costly. Directive counseling often isnt
  accepted by modern, independent employees.
• Participative (cooperative) counseling is a
  mutual counselor-counselee relationship that
  establishes a cooperative exchange of ideas to
  help solve a counselees problems.

• A managers decision to use either directive,
  participative or nondirective counseling with an
  employee should be based on an analysis of
  several contingency factors. It should not be
  made solely on the managers personal preference
  or past experience.
• However, the managers knowledge and capacity to
  use a variety of methods are clearly critical
  factors in choosing hoe to proceed.