Recently, the Central Bank of Russia announced it was hiring staff psychologists. The idea of providing emotional support to employees deserves endorsement. The workload on bank managers is enormous: a high level of responsibility, large cash flows and a high cost of error, conflicts of interest between departments and individual employees typical of Russian banking culture, and constantly changing regulatory requirements. Risk management and compliance departments bear a particularly heavy burden. Relatively high salaries do not compensate for lost health. Employees need help maintaining emotional equilibrium and learning to cope with pressures without damaging their emotional and physical well-being. Many companies and banks around the world already have employee psychological assistance programs.
To organize such support without harming either employees or the company, five conditions must be met.
1. Ensure the Independence of Psychologists
Psychologists should not be hired as staff members of the company (which is why the Central Bank's decision to hire psychologists in-house seems tactically misguided). It is risky to entrust personal feelings to a psychologist who is embedded in the same team, involved in the same office conflicts, and subject to the same manipulations as all other employees. For example, some time ago schools began hiring staff psychologists to ease conflicts between students, between teachers and children, and so on. But fairly quickly, many in-house psychologists turned into a tool of school administrations for influencing teachers and students.
2. Limit Who Receives the Support
Companies should invest in emotional support not for all employees, but only for the most valuable ones — those who, precisely because of their honesty, responsibility, and heavy workload, are the first to experience professional burnout.
3. Choose Only Experienced Psychologists
Select only seasoned psychological consultants and psychotherapists who can interact as equals with the company's managers who need emotional support. The most valuable employees are, as a rule, highly educated people who simply will not take a novice psychologist seriously.
4. Guarantee Confidentiality
Ensure that no one in the office knows that a particular employee is meeting with a psychologist. The mere fact of seeing a psychologist can become a tool of manipulation in office conflicts, and that must not be allowed.
5. Clearly Define Ethical Boundaries
Clearly delineate the responsibilities for upholding ethical standards among the administration, the employee, and the psychologist.
The psychologist must provide proof that they have completed the required hours of psychotherapy themselves. This is a guarantee that they will not unconsciously project their own emotional problems onto their clients. They must preserve the confidentiality of the client's private life, except in situations involving criminal liability or danger to the lives of others.
Company leaders may recommend that employees consult a psychologist to address a particular issue, but they must not know the content of their subordinates' conversations with the psychologist. And if such information accidentally becomes known to a leader, they must not use it to pressure the employee or make it public.
All these rules must be discussed between the company's leaders and the psychologist before the work begins.