Workplace Consulting

Workplace Consulting is the core of our workplace health service offering. Our experienced consultants provide research and guidance to assist organizations in connecting the health of their human assets to business goals and decision making.

Your Partner in Workplace Health

As Your Partner in Workplace Health£™, our primary focus is to serve your organization's goals and objectives by maximizing the resiliency, effectiveness and well-being of your employees. Our consultants are clinicians, psychologists, educators and coaches with senior-level experience.

We encourage and support a collaborative relationship with stakeholder groups and offer services to educate and assist line management to deal with the human issues in the workplace. In fact, we specialize in all areas of high-risk employee behaviour, working with organizations to help them to minimize that risk through prevention and early intervention.

The consulting services listed below illustrate some of the ways that our expertise can be applied to support a healthy workplace strategy.

Healthy Workplace Consulting

The Healthy Workplace model was developed by the National Quality Institute (NQI)*. FSEAP consultants are trained Healthy Workplace facilitators. The Healthy Workplace model is designed to help organizations move forward at a strategic and process level with a system-wide approach to workplace health. A Healthy Workplace facilitator can help your organization begin or support a process of visioning and planning, policy and procedures development, leadership development, program development, communication and cultural transformation, measurement and evaluation.

*Family Services Employee Assistance Programs (FSEAP) is a workplace health services provider partnered with the National Quality Institute.

Assessment and Analysis

Through assessment and analysis our consultants assist organizations in establishing a framework within which to build systems that support productive satisfied employees. Assessment may include:

• A formal needs assessment to determine benchmarks and inform program development;
• A workplace survey, analysis and consultation to determine the level of worker stress, satisfaction and engagement;
• An assessment of management practice and supports.

Policy Development

Our workplace consultants are professional staff with senior level experience and advanced training. They have expertise in the areas of organizational behaviour, development, health and communication. Consultations are available to assist organizations in developing:

• Crisis response procedures (see also Critical Incident Response);
• Violence policies (see also Take10 Violence Prevention);
• Respectful return-to-work strategies (see also Depression PLUS);
• Drug and alcohol policies (see also Addictions PLUS).

Change Management

Organizations are recognizing that change is no longer a discrete event but a continuum. A poorly implemented change initiative can result in group conflicts, employee stress and burnout, poor morale and decreased productivity. Costs can quickly escalate. Our consultants are able to assist leaders in completing critical aspects of the change process such as developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision to employees and anchoring new approaches in the organizational culture. In addition, they are able to develop custom training programs for employees to increase their ability to adapt during stressful times, coaching programs to ensure managers are supportive and team building to address conflict and restore productivity.

Program Development

Our approach to program development ensures that solutions are appropriate and adaptable to the workplace culture and integrated with the organization's other health, safety, management, measurement and evaluation initiatives. Our consultants can assist organizations though the initial stage of gaining senior-level support, to data collection and planning, to choosing appropriate interventions and support, to evaluating outcomes. For information about the many programs and tools available from Family Services Employee Assistance Programs and Integrated Workplace Solutions, see the Workplace Health section of this site.

Workplace Interventions

All workplace interventions begin with an assessment of the work climate. The assessment helps to identify underlying issues and behaviours that may be undermining relationships and contributing to on-going conflict and reduced productivity. Policies, procedures, training programs, communication practices and formal/informal codes of conduct are examined. Issues of organizational and cultural change are considered. Interventions may involve elements of policy development, program development, employee and manager training and wellness education.

Some examples:

• To address team dysfunction, an intervention may include a series of intensive group sessions designed to encourage the adoption of a shared value system, renew individual and group commitment, teach creative approaches to problem solving and empower work teams. Follow-up sessions monitor changing group dynamics and resolve residual conflict.
  
• Conflicts between pairs of co-workers may be resolved through a process of facilitated conflict resolution, with a counsellor as guide. The counsellor will assist the parties to resolve their difficulties in a respectful and productive manner while encouraging them to develop skills to use to resolve future issues on their own.

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