How to Build Rapport, Reduce Tension
How to Build Rapport, Reduce Tension, and Prevent Burnout in the Workplace
Jessica Conrad, MAC, LPC, and DSL Student at Regent University
Working in a high-stress environment can be one of the most damaging aspects of anyone’s career. As a Clinical Counselor working in an all-girls, teenage residential facility, I experience firsthand the daily wear and tear of emotional stress coming from all directions. People demanding respect yet struggling with an unwillingness to give it first. The constant strain of feeling like you are being treated unfairly and deserve better. Being away from friends and family, surrounded by strangers, can be hard on anyone, especially teenagers who feel locked-up and abandoned by the world. Crisis after crisis, hour after hour, day after day. After so long, the stress and tension cause conflicts between everyone. The clients. The staff. The caseworkers. The parents. Everyone. So, how do we learn to build rapport, reduce tension, and prevent burnout in the workplace? Below is a simple “how-to” guide to assist your organization and those struggling with stress and tension, offering a place to begin.
What is Rapport?
When it comes to communication within the counselor-client relationship, rapport is
the glue that binds the relationship together and influences change within the individual. Therapists are taught this from the very beginning of their training. Rapport is about building trust in a way that makes communication easier and fluent. It is a dance with words and body language between two individuals, or a group of people, who are interested in hearing one another and showing concern for each other’s thoughts and feelings. It’s a way to say,
“I hear you. I see you. I’m with you. I care about you.” Over time, this depth of empathy can play a significant role in the therapeutic setting, especially when working with traumatized victims.
What is Tension?
Tension—the mental or emotional strain that affects the mind and body—is a natural part of life. Tension happens at home, at work, and in everyday social encounters. Tension can happen at any moment on any day, between any two or more individuals. It can even occur between an individual and an inanimate item, such as a deadline. Stress and tension are experienced anywhere and everywhere and can come from any event or thought that creates feelings of frustration, anger, or worry.
What is Burnout?
Unaddressed built-up stress and tension often lead to burnout. Burnout can be experienced in any of the above-mentioned places of tension but is primarily experienced in the workplace and directly linked to work-related stress. Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion resulting from long-term, unresolved stress, especially when working with traumatized victims. With increased emotional and psychological stress come physical complications as well such as headaches, depression, insomnia, heartburn, rapid breathing, high blood pressure, a weakened immune system, stomachaches, and muscle tension, just to name a few.
How Does This Affect You?
A high-stress environment woven to regular interactions with traumatized victims can take a toll on support professionals often leading to compassion fatigue, secondary and vicarious trauma, and eventually to volunteer employment termination. So, how can organizations geared toward working with traumatized individuals prevent this burnout cycle from happening while also helping maintain the sanity of their employees? A simple solution would be to offer the same treatment to the employees, that the organization is offering to their clientele – therapy.
Therapy offers a way for employees to express their thoughts and feelings weighing them down when the passion and enthusiasm they started with begins to fade away. The wear and tear of the daily grind can leave an emotional residue of exposure to working with those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events, on even the strongest of individuals. Over time, this residue begins to leak into other areas of employees’ lives, impacting those closest to them. Employees take the stress and tension of their workday home, often resulting in even more stress and tension. Employees then bring that added stress and tension from home back to work, and the cycle continues until eventually the emotional and psychological effects are too much to handle, and they snap. Sometimes that snap looks like an unprofessional emotional outburst; an apathetic and disrespectful attitude; or spontaneously walking out on the job leaving their coworkers behind to pick up the pieces. The results can be catastrophic. The employees are treating the clients the same way the clients are treating the employees, and this vicious cycle unintentionally re-traumatizes the clients through their own traumatic encounter.
Along with processing thoughts and feelings in cognitive-behavioral therapy, employees would also benefit from the psychoeducational side of therapy. It is hard enough for highly educated and trained professionals to cope with the secondary and vicarious trauma experienced when working with survivors of traumatic life events, however, for employees who have only trained for a couple of weeks to work with or near these clients, it can be even harder. In these instances, therapy can also offer a way for employees to vent, ask questions, receive feedback, and be educated in knowing how to communicate effectively with traumatized individuals, in a way that can be very beneficial for the work environment, as well as in their personal lives.
Why Communication is Key
Effective communication is a critical issue in all organizations, but especially in residential organizations. According to Barry and Monique Reece in their book Effective Human Relations, effective communication includes the ability to be open and honest with a relaxed attitude, appropriate nonverbal connection, passion, and active listening—all qualities therapists are taught and practice throughout their educational and professional journey to become experts at building rapport, but can be just as helpful for all employees to know and practice. Until rapport is understood, built upon, and established, the tension in the workplace will continue to rise and burnout will continue to be an issue.
This brings up another crucial element of effective communication—speaking assertively. Assertiveness is a quality few too many people possess. It is one of the most misunderstood,
but absolutely necessary qualities to have. Assertiveness communicates in a direct, yet respectful way. According to Dr. David Walton in his book Emotional Intelligence, assertiveness can be one of many things including, “Saying what you think, making requests and asking for help, negotiating solutions acceptable to everyone, refusing requests, refusing to be patronized or put down, making complaints, clarifying expectations, expressing your optimism in the face of negativity, showing appreciation, affection, hurt feelings, and justifiable annoyance, overcoming hesitation about ‘putting things on the table,’ giving and receiving compliments, and working to help others.” To summarize, assertiveness is knowing how to express your feelings while remaining in control of your emotions when confronted with tension and feelings of vulnerability.
How to Prevent Burnout
Therapy provides education, support, motivation, and encouragement for employees. Not only do the employees benefit from this type of therapy, the clients indirectly do as well. The skills learned and practiced in therapy will lead to a more stable environment for the employees, as well as the clients. More stability means better communication, better client care, a less stressful and more therapeutic environment, lower turnover rates (thus saving money on new hire training), improves the safety for everyone, and improves productivity—ultimately leading to less corporate kickback. Clients and employees will learn to work together instead of against one another. Together they will begin to practice self-care and learn how to do so together.
Ways to Improve Self-Care
Self-care looks different to everyone yet offers the same healthy results. The American Health Association published an article in 2020 titled “Fight Stress with Healthy Habits” that encourages people to slow down, sleep more, worry less, laugh more, stay connected, get organized, practice giving back, remain active daily, give up bad habits, and embrace change. There are a surmountable number of ways those healthy habits can be combined to offer anyone the stress relief they are looking for. Start with one. Employees can create a plan of action with their therapist by setting short- and long-term goals that will help improve their work ethic,
build self-esteem, and enhance communication skills.
There are six dimensions trauma professionals can focus on to help them go from living an unpleasant high-stressed life, to a well-balanced tension-free life. Those dimensions are spiritual, emotional, psychological, physical, professional, and personal. One way to remember these dimensions is with the acronym SE4P which looks and sounds like the word “seep” just spelled wrong but is exactly the result professionals are looking for. When those six dimensions begin to seep their way into an individual’s daily life, positive change occurs. Unfortunately, therapy is only one psychological dimension of the Self-Care Wheel created by Olga Phoenix, an
internationally recognized expert and speaker on the topics of Vicarious Trauma, Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Trauma-Informed services. The other five dimensions are something individuals must choose to implement into their daily lives if they hope to achieve the desired results of living and working in a vicarious trauma-free life.
How You Can Help Your Employees
A way for organizations to help their support professionals maintain this balanced, self-care loving attitude is to provide ways to engage in one of the six dimensions daily. To meet spiritual needs, employees can schedule a time for self-reflection, meditation, praying, singing, dancing, or taking a walk outside during their breaks. Emotionally, the organization can offer daily affirmations to remind employees to affirm themselves, practice self-love and compassion, and laughing out loud in a safe place. Self-reflection, journaling, reading self-help books, and asking for help are all ways to improve psychological wellness and self-awareness. Providing ways to get regular exercise, affordable medical care, healthy food, and adequate time off with paid vacation and the ability to unplug will improve the physical wellbeing and long-term dedication of support professionals.
Professionally, it is detrimental for organizations to respect the boundaries set by employees. This includes encouraging employees to take regular breaks, not working overtime, leaving work at work—including not calling unless there is an emergency, not working while taking time off, getting regular supervision, taking mental health days, attending training, and taking all vacation and sick days available. Receiving all of these benefits from an organization bleeds positivity into employees’ personal lives. They are able to learn who they are and how that role plays into their job, create a vision board for themselves and the organization, foster life-long friendships, spend more time relaxing with their families, and learning new things. Once again, indirectly inspiring the clients they work with daily to do the same.
How to Overcome Kickback
For anyone, change can be difficult. It takes focus and dedication, commitment to
see it through to the end, tenacity, perseverance, and a sheer will of determination. Implementing therapy weekly, along with monthly meetings and quarterly training, will convey a message from the organization to their employees the value they see in the people they hire. When an organization offers a way to show investment in its employees, loyalty is formed, and morale is boosted. People no longer come to work for a paycheck, but rather they show up because they personally experience the benefits of and understand the significance of the job they are performing.
Organizations that offer therapy know and believe their employees are worth the investment. Not only are they able to see the benefits for both their employees and their clients, but the organization is also able to see how it is profiting. This aspect may be a lucrative advantage for future employees to desire to work at this organization, showing that tension and burnout is something that your organization understands is a reality, and that your organization is actively working to prevent. Not only will future professional therapists desire to be employed at this organization, but most staff employees will no longer be so easily tempted to voluntarily terminate their employment. And since the organization is keen on rapport being the goal between its employees and clients, this rapport will directly influence the long-term advantage of an organization’s success.
Conclusion
Bringing the building rapport with clients into the building rapport between organization and employees together ultimately leads to overall reduced tension and preventable burnout. Therapy offers one way that influences many other ways to enable employees to grow and develop personally and professionally. Assertive and effective communication is the glue that allows the rapport to be built, and although therapy is one of the six dimensions an individual can make in calming stress in their life, it is a dynamic that will continue to lead to not just individual health, but the health and success of the organization and everyone included within it.
Jessica Conrad, MAC, LPC, and DSL Student at Regent University
Working in a high-stress environment can be one of the most damaging aspects of anyone’s career. As a Clinical Counselor working in an all-girls, teenage residential facility, I experience firsthand the daily wear and tear of emotional stress coming from all directions. People demanding respect yet struggling with an unwillingness to give it first. The constant strain of feeling like you are being treated unfairly and deserve better. Being away from friends and family, surrounded by strangers, can be hard on anyone, especially teenagers who feel locked-up and abandoned by the world. Crisis after crisis, hour after hour, day after day. After so long, the stress and tension cause conflicts between everyone. The clients. The staff. The caseworkers. The parents. Everyone. So, how do we learn to build rapport, reduce tension, and prevent burnout in the workplace? Below is a simple “how-to” guide to assist your organization and those struggling with stress and tension, offering a place to begin.
What is Rapport?
When it comes to communication within the counselor-client relationship, rapport is
the glue that binds the relationship together and influences change within the individual. Therapists are taught this from the very beginning of their training. Rapport is about building trust in a way that makes communication easier and fluent. It is a dance with words and body language between two individuals, or a group of people, who are interested in hearing one another and showing concern for each other’s thoughts and feelings. It’s a way to say,
“I hear you. I see you. I’m with you. I care about you.” Over time, this depth of empathy can play a significant role in the therapeutic setting, especially when working with traumatized victims.
What is Tension?
Tension—the mental or emotional strain that affects the mind and body—is a natural part of life. Tension happens at home, at work, and in everyday social encounters. Tension can happen at any moment on any day, between any two or more individuals. It can even occur between an individual and an inanimate item, such as a deadline. Stress and tension are experienced anywhere and everywhere and can come from any event or thought that creates feelings of frustration, anger, or worry.
What is Burnout?
Unaddressed built-up stress and tension often lead to burnout. Burnout can be experienced in any of the above-mentioned places of tension but is primarily experienced in the workplace and directly linked to work-related stress. Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion resulting from long-term, unresolved stress, especially when working with traumatized victims. With increased emotional and psychological stress come physical complications as well such as headaches, depression, insomnia, heartburn, rapid breathing, high blood pressure, a weakened immune system, stomachaches, and muscle tension, just to name a few.
How Does This Affect You?
A high-stress environment woven to regular interactions with traumatized victims can take a toll on support professionals often leading to compassion fatigue, secondary and vicarious trauma, and eventually to volunteer employment termination. So, how can organizations geared toward working with traumatized individuals prevent this burnout cycle from happening while also helping maintain the sanity of their employees? A simple solution would be to offer the same treatment to the employees, that the organization is offering to their clientele – therapy.
Therapy offers a way for employees to express their thoughts and feelings weighing them down when the passion and enthusiasm they started with begins to fade away. The wear and tear of the daily grind can leave an emotional residue of exposure to working with those suffering from the consequences of traumatic events, on even the strongest of individuals. Over time, this residue begins to leak into other areas of employees’ lives, impacting those closest to them. Employees take the stress and tension of their workday home, often resulting in even more stress and tension. Employees then bring that added stress and tension from home back to work, and the cycle continues until eventually the emotional and psychological effects are too much to handle, and they snap. Sometimes that snap looks like an unprofessional emotional outburst; an apathetic and disrespectful attitude; or spontaneously walking out on the job leaving their coworkers behind to pick up the pieces. The results can be catastrophic. The employees are treating the clients the same way the clients are treating the employees, and this vicious cycle unintentionally re-traumatizes the clients through their own traumatic encounter.
Along with processing thoughts and feelings in cognitive-behavioral therapy, employees would also benefit from the psychoeducational side of therapy. It is hard enough for highly educated and trained professionals to cope with the secondary and vicarious trauma experienced when working with survivors of traumatic life events, however, for employees who have only trained for a couple of weeks to work with or near these clients, it can be even harder. In these instances, therapy can also offer a way for employees to vent, ask questions, receive feedback, and be educated in knowing how to communicate effectively with traumatized individuals, in a way that can be very beneficial for the work environment, as well as in their personal lives.
Why Communication is Key
Effective communication is a critical issue in all organizations, but especially in residential organizations. According to Barry and Monique Reece in their book Effective Human Relations, effective communication includes the ability to be open and honest with a relaxed attitude, appropriate nonverbal connection, passion, and active listening—all qualities therapists are taught and practice throughout their educational and professional journey to become experts at building rapport, but can be just as helpful for all employees to know and practice. Until rapport is understood, built upon, and established, the tension in the workplace will continue to rise and burnout will continue to be an issue.
This brings up another crucial element of effective communication—speaking assertively. Assertiveness is a quality few too many people possess. It is one of the most misunderstood,
but absolutely necessary qualities to have. Assertiveness communicates in a direct, yet respectful way. According to Dr. David Walton in his book Emotional Intelligence, assertiveness can be one of many things including, “Saying what you think, making requests and asking for help, negotiating solutions acceptable to everyone, refusing requests, refusing to be patronized or put down, making complaints, clarifying expectations, expressing your optimism in the face of negativity, showing appreciation, affection, hurt feelings, and justifiable annoyance, overcoming hesitation about ‘putting things on the table,’ giving and receiving compliments, and working to help others.” To summarize, assertiveness is knowing how to express your feelings while remaining in control of your emotions when confronted with tension and feelings of vulnerability.
How to Prevent Burnout
Therapy provides education, support, motivation, and encouragement for employees. Not only do the employees benefit from this type of therapy, the clients indirectly do as well. The skills learned and practiced in therapy will lead to a more stable environment for the employees, as well as the clients. More stability means better communication, better client care, a less stressful and more therapeutic environment, lower turnover rates (thus saving money on new hire training), improves the safety for everyone, and improves productivity—ultimately leading to less corporate kickback. Clients and employees will learn to work together instead of against one another. Together they will begin to practice self-care and learn how to do so together.
Ways to Improve Self-Care
Self-care looks different to everyone yet offers the same healthy results. The American Health Association published an article in 2020 titled “Fight Stress with Healthy Habits” that encourages people to slow down, sleep more, worry less, laugh more, stay connected, get organized, practice giving back, remain active daily, give up bad habits, and embrace change. There are a surmountable number of ways those healthy habits can be combined to offer anyone the stress relief they are looking for. Start with one. Employees can create a plan of action with their therapist by setting short- and long-term goals that will help improve their work ethic,
build self-esteem, and enhance communication skills.
There are six dimensions trauma professionals can focus on to help them go from living an unpleasant high-stressed life, to a well-balanced tension-free life. Those dimensions are spiritual, emotional, psychological, physical, professional, and personal. One way to remember these dimensions is with the acronym SE4P which looks and sounds like the word “seep” just spelled wrong but is exactly the result professionals are looking for. When those six dimensions begin to seep their way into an individual’s daily life, positive change occurs. Unfortunately, therapy is only one psychological dimension of the Self-Care Wheel created by Olga Phoenix, an
internationally recognized expert and speaker on the topics of Vicarious Trauma, Compassion Fatigue, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Trauma-Informed services. The other five dimensions are something individuals must choose to implement into their daily lives if they hope to achieve the desired results of living and working in a vicarious trauma-free life.
How You Can Help Your Employees
A way for organizations to help their support professionals maintain this balanced, self-care loving attitude is to provide ways to engage in one of the six dimensions daily. To meet spiritual needs, employees can schedule a time for self-reflection, meditation, praying, singing, dancing, or taking a walk outside during their breaks. Emotionally, the organization can offer daily affirmations to remind employees to affirm themselves, practice self-love and compassion, and laughing out loud in a safe place. Self-reflection, journaling, reading self-help books, and asking for help are all ways to improve psychological wellness and self-awareness. Providing ways to get regular exercise, affordable medical care, healthy food, and adequate time off with paid vacation and the ability to unplug will improve the physical wellbeing and long-term dedication of support professionals.
Professionally, it is detrimental for organizations to respect the boundaries set by employees. This includes encouraging employees to take regular breaks, not working overtime, leaving work at work—including not calling unless there is an emergency, not working while taking time off, getting regular supervision, taking mental health days, attending training, and taking all vacation and sick days available. Receiving all of these benefits from an organization bleeds positivity into employees’ personal lives. They are able to learn who they are and how that role plays into their job, create a vision board for themselves and the organization, foster life-long friendships, spend more time relaxing with their families, and learning new things. Once again, indirectly inspiring the clients they work with daily to do the same.
How to Overcome Kickback
For anyone, change can be difficult. It takes focus and dedication, commitment to
see it through to the end, tenacity, perseverance, and a sheer will of determination. Implementing therapy weekly, along with monthly meetings and quarterly training, will convey a message from the organization to their employees the value they see in the people they hire. When an organization offers a way to show investment in its employees, loyalty is formed, and morale is boosted. People no longer come to work for a paycheck, but rather they show up because they personally experience the benefits of and understand the significance of the job they are performing.
Organizations that offer therapy know and believe their employees are worth the investment. Not only are they able to see the benefits for both their employees and their clients, but the organization is also able to see how it is profiting. This aspect may be a lucrative advantage for future employees to desire to work at this organization, showing that tension and burnout is something that your organization understands is a reality, and that your organization is actively working to prevent. Not only will future professional therapists desire to be employed at this organization, but most staff employees will no longer be so easily tempted to voluntarily terminate their employment. And since the organization is keen on rapport being the goal between its employees and clients, this rapport will directly influence the long-term advantage of an organization’s success.
Conclusion
Bringing the building rapport with clients into the building rapport between organization and employees together ultimately leads to overall reduced tension and preventable burnout. Therapy offers one way that influences many other ways to enable employees to grow and develop personally and professionally. Assertive and effective communication is the glue that allows the rapport to be built, and although therapy is one of the six dimensions an individual can make in calming stress in their life, it is a dynamic that will continue to lead to not just individual health, but the health and success of the organization and everyone included within it.
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This was a great read. I really understood what I was reading about and I am encouraged to share this new information with the organization that I work for. Thanks for posting this!