How do you deal with an employee who approaches you for assistance on personal matters?  Follow these steps to provide the best advice you can:

1. Feel Flattered – The fact that the employee is approaching you means that they trust you and respect your opinion. In response, you have an obligation to provide the employee with the best advice you can.

2. What’s Happening?

  • Start with the basics and find out what is happening and get a clear picture of the problem.
  • Reduce the initial stress that the employee is presenting by unravelling the problem into smaller, manageable pieces and encourage the employee to keep an open mind in terms of possible solutions.
  • Assess the problem, if it is a significant personal issue that you feel you are not qualified to assist with, then help the employee to find professional help.
  • Assess the severity of the problem from relatively unimportant to life-threatening and identify the key issues.
  • Once you have heard the story, and you believe you understand the issues, try to present different ways of viewing the problem through questioning the employee.  Sometimes people are incapable of reaching the answer because they can’t change the way that they see themselves in relation to the problem or can’t see beyond the problem in order to find a resolution.
  • When addressing the actual issues, start with the things that will make a difference.  Specifically point out the most important issues to address and ask the employee to help prioritise them and assign them a value from most important to least important.
  • If the issues are complicated and convoluted, begin to unwind them into sub-problems of problems and again address the issues that would be easily addressed.  This helps the employee to feel empowered and encourages them to take control of what may otherwise be an overwhelming situation.

3. The Answers

  • Help the employee to identify what the issues or problems would look like if someone had to wave a magic wand.  This helps to identify a range of possible outcomes.
  • Use the possible outcomes to work backwards towards the problems and identify achievable goals that would probably lead to the desired outcome. Goals should be flexible, if possible, and while setting a time frame to achieve them, is useful to push action and direction. They should not add to an already stressful situation.
  • Finding the answers should be about showing the employee they have choices that they can make and the possibility of resolving the matter exists.
  • At this point, it is sometimes necessary to do a cost-benefit analysis on whether the employee feels that the cost of achieving the goals and the time it will take is still worth the benefit. Examine the employee’s incentives for achieving the goal or resolving the underlying issues and make sure it is still worth it, in terms of time, money and energy.
  • If it is worth it, the employee will commit to the resolution strategy and take ownership of the goals.

4. Action

  • Assist the employee to develop a framework, do not develop the framework for the employee as it undermines the feeling of control and empowerment that the preceding steps are trying to achieve.
  • Encourage the employee to keep track of the progress they are making towards resolving the issues and to keep reformatting the plan, so that there is no disillusion when life doesn’t work in straight lines. A hiccough shouldn’t prevent the employee from picking himself up and dusting himself off again.

Candice Eaton

Head of HR and Labour Consulting, Johannesburg