Today's organizations are constantly changing and evolving. The opening of companies with respect to the attention of the needs of their workers is a fact in motion.
We consider the mental health of the worker as a fundamental part for the development of the company.
Our proposal is focused on achieving organizational change through the individual therapeutic process within the context of the company. Specifically, our experience in the company Suleón SA de CV in the city of León Gto.
Of the outstanding results, it is found that the areas in which these people improved were: family (77%), work (17%), friends (3%), character, couple relationship and personally (3%), obtaining a significant improvement of 100%.
Below we present the results obtained from this new way of implementing therapy in companies.
Introduction
“There is a theory that states that if someone discovered what exactly the Universe is and why it exists, it would instantly disappear and be replaced by something even stranger and more inexplicable. There is another theory that affirms that this has already happened ” Douglas Adams
The End of the World restaurant
At the moment that we are entities that move in a Universe organized in a complex way, it implies, from its Latin etymology and in its nature, that everything is related and intertwined. The derivations of the above are found in the nature of the interactions that govern all the elements of the subsystems that develop within the macrosystem. Interaction implies communication and organization that consolidates structures just as atoms do in a given wall.
Therefore, a system, be it a galaxy or a company, participate in the same principles that govern our Universe, which are, according to Edgar Morin (1970) the dialogic (the apparent contradictions find a point of balance and fusion), the recursive (the bidirectionality of the interaction between causes and effects) and the hologrammatic (the whole is both included in the parts as much as the whole is represented in these).
This paradigm allows us to think in a multidirectional and circular way, seeing that the principles of Brief Systemic Therapy find their coupled development within the framework where two systems meet: the person and the company. This indicates that the supported growth of both represents an organization that increases its emotional, economic and cultural capital flows that are the basis of intelligent systems whose inputs are the complexity, adaptation and diversification of characteristic functions of self-sustaining systems that grow and they remain at the forefront.
Our article is the product of our work within the company Suleón SA de CV in the city of León Guanajuato, where we impart Brief Systemic Therapy for a period of 7 months for personnel of all levels, focused on achieving organizational change through individual therapeutic process. We present here the results and conclusions we reached in our practice.
Our contemporary social context
The vertiginous social reality that we have built in the 20th century and that we inherit in the 21st marks a course for business organizations. When talking about changes we must take into account the context in which they develop and the way they impact people's minds. For this reason, a company that prides itself on being competitive in the framework we mentioned requires constantly listening and attending to the feedback from both the micro and the macro, that is, both from the situation outside the company, and from the people who provide it. constitute. This is systems thinking.
The opening of the companies forms of operation based on the scientific principles of the modern Administration allows them to find fluid forms of operation, but there are others that in the systemic thinking to which we have alluded, include the attention of the needs in the matter of health mental health of the workers to increase the complexity of the organization because the feedback indicates that, if ignored, they are sources of stagnation with situations such as dysfunctionality in the work environment, lack of motivation, wasted use of time due to mental dispersion, resistance to teamwork, intransigence to change,deficit in structural communication and inadequate stress management to mention some that are isomorphic with experiences that occur in daily interaction with social circles such as family and peer groups.
With this we can point out as a working premise that person and company are interdependent and therefore their problems concern both. However, we must point out a precautionary note at the risk that it seems obvious: our proposal and work was limited to a specific context and situation of an organization, which means that although the techniques of the Brief Systemic Therapy were used for the difficulties emanating from the personal interaction, other intervention strategies had to be developed ad hoc to what emerged. Hence, psychological setbacks cannot be solved in the same way in all companies; It is not like a recipe to follow, in which a few steps are completed and the problem disappears.
Brief Systemic Therapy: its characteristics
The 21st century company requires global theoretical frameworks that seek the configuration of realities from plural readings. Systemic brief therapy works under the same process, that is, building new narratives based on social events. What we present in this section is a synthetic vision of the operation of the Brief Systemic Therapy to be able to frame the field of action of the same within the company.
Brief Systemic Therapy, which is already known as "time-effective" or "time-cost effective" therapy (Budman & Gurman, 1988), is used in the treatment of emotional problems as well as the approximately 400 approaches therapeutics that exist. However, it emphasizes that the problems generated have their origin and maintenance from a social framework, that is, a problem always has a relational framework. The difficulties originate in the interaction with a reality constructed in daily life and therefore, the solutions must be oriented in that same area in changing the interactions of the person with their environment and, by achieving this, it will result in an inner psychic transformation.
This perspective differs from traditional psychotherapy by indicating that the solution does not originate in a signaling or interpretation in a consulting room, but rather that the person produces it by changing their way of relating to others and with the narratives and constructions of life that they themselves carry out. In this, effective time therapy, as its name implies, emphasizes the maximization of results with the decrease in therapeutic attention time since the person's own resources are used to generate changes that are adapted to their being and happening.
This is done in order to collaborate with the person to take control of their future without having to depend intellectually or emotionally on the therapist. On the other hand, we found that a brief systemic framework suited the company's ways of working and its ways of using production time since, isomorphically, both therapy and organization have their meeting point in Taylor's vision (1903) in his study of the times and movements of the principles of scientific administration.
For the above goal, in therapeutic work we use two premises: to make the problem part of the solution and to work fundamentally to co-create a viable and possible solution for the person without giving so much therapeutic importance to how the difficulty originated. Both working assumptions belong to two schools in Systemic Family Therapy: the Palo Alto Strategic Therapy (1967) and the Solution-Centered approach (De Shazer & Berg, 1985). Both schools agree to limit the number of sessions to optimize the independence and generation of emotional resources of the people.
The solution to the problems is found, from the aforementioned models, not in the understanding of childhood or past problems, but in the construction of alternatives in the present and with future projections and where the therapist does not have the last word with with respect to what happens to the client / patient, but is a collaborator in the gestation of a life project.
Regarding the working time used in effective time therapy, the number of sessions that are used can vary according to the psychological tools of the consultant and their availability to change (essential factor) and that can go, according to each school in a range of one to ten sessions to agree to solve the problem. In our case, and in accordance with innovations that we implemented in previous community interventions, we limited ourselves to an intervention of five sessions distributed as follows: one session per week and, upon reaching the fourth, the last was scheduled for fifteen days later. In order for the person to become aware of the changes made or required to make to achieve the desired effect.
In the event that in the last session a person said that they required more attention time, they were instructed to focus for two months on solving what they had first brought and then, if they continued to require it, they could be attended to. The purpose of this was focused on avoiding dependence on psychological counseling and pushing the person to resolve their situation and in that way, they could find their own guidelines to solve others that were presented to them.
Therapeutic work in the workplace
In an organization or company the mental health of the worker is a fundamental part for it to develop since anyone who has problems and cannot solve them, can become a stumbling block so that they can carry out their work activities efficiently. It is important and fundamental to see the human side of the worker.
The human capital factor treated therapeutically is the first step towards the growth of the complexity of the company and a sure step towards the consolidation of an intelligent organization, where each member will be a part of the whole - from their functions - and mental health It will be the first and most important capital because from it will come the flood of productivity that will generate added value in the economy and personal satisfaction to all the elements of the company: if something in the system is modified, the entire system has a reaction. A company where the psychological needs of the employee are covered, there is greater satisfaction, commitment and work productivity and there is a higher quality work environment.
Our interventions had been limited to the community setting in therapeutic care for populations affected by marginalization and poverty as part of a Professional Social Service program at the Universidad Iberoamericana León. After the completion of the project, there was an approach by the Engineer Federico Portillo, from the company SULEÓN SA DE CV, who was interested in the integral well-being of its workers and in the implementation of strategies that would support their mental health.
Based on your request, we develop a work plan and we address the task of serving the people within the aforementioned organization, in the city of León Guanajuato, with an effective time approach. The objective of the program was to provide them with guidance to discover and develop tools to solve their problem. As a by-product we expected people to broaden their horizon of possibilities in terms of a better quality of life and development in the personal and work environment.
The treatment was carried out within the company during working hours and with a consultation duration of 50 minutes, and the company set up a cubicle for the privacy of therapeutic conversations.
The program lasted from February to August 2008. Throughout it, a total of 67 interested employees were served, without any recidivism. The most common problems were depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, problems in family interaction, cases of alcoholism and drug addiction.
The areas in which they reported improvement were: their family environment (77 percent), work (17 percent), friends (3 percent), character, relationship with their partner and personally (3 percent). On the other hand, with regard to their perception of the quality of the service and their availability to access it again, 94 percent think that the treatment received by the team was adequate and was beneficial in achieving significant changes in their work situations. lifetime. In this area, the ratings given by users were found that 100 percent recommend the service and 90 percent would take it again in case of another difficulty.
conclusion
From our intervention, we realized that there had not been a similar work previously carried out in the business context with the characteristics that we present. And with this, it was observed that there is a great need for employees to have professional support in their emotional life since their functioning in daily life depends on their well-being. With the work carried out, we detected areas of opportunity for a psychological intervention that has its sights set on increasing the mental health of employees and that results in helping to achieve different objectives of the company.
Therefore, we consider that the best option for the postmodern businessman to invest is in his human capital - where he himself enters - through therapeutic approaches that focus on solutions for his staff in a brief, efficient and effective way. The time and method of maneuvering the systemic vision, both in business strategy and in therapy, is now and its effects are built for the benefit of the organization.
Our contribution from experience is to see the company as a whole that includes both its processes, furniture, products and representations as well as collective psychological well-being. When this is achieved, the organization will grow and expand its horizon of possibilities. The sum of the mental health of the components of the company will result in generating a system that is self-sustaining and that goes towards the growth of each and every one of its components.
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