Last week Susan*, HR manager for a financial services company in the City of London, described her emotional distress dealing with the credit crunch. Chartered psychologist Linda Hoyle, writes her response to what she read:

"Whoever Susan works for is very fortunate to have her. She is obviously an experienced HR practitioner and her coaching expertise means she can provide a sophisticated support role. However, I think she has two key challenges. First, how does she get senior management to recognise and value the pastoral role of HR and second, how does she get some support for herself so that she does not end up burned-out?

"Susan's role is vital to the health of the organisation, but her efforts are invisible to a management that tends to speak in terms of profit and loss. The only way for Susan to get through to the management team is to start speaking their language.

"I suggest that Susan sets up an internal evaluation system to measure the actual impact good people management skills has on the bottom line, retention of talented staff and improvement in client relationships.

"By presenting how her coaching programme has improved conditions in the workplace, she could demonstrate the impact of not supporting staff in this way - a cost in terms of lost talent, recruitment, absenteeism and reduced productivity. I would encourage her to get feedback from staff who have actually attended coaching sessions. This will give her quantitative and qualitative data to support her case.

"While I agree it is important to preserve confidentiality I would encourage Susan to feed back key organisational themes to senior management. Susan needs to make the management team aware she will be doing this and that they will be receiving important information about what is going on in the organisation that might inform their leadership decisions. Susan is, after all, in the privileged position of being at the coalface during the credit crunch. She understands more than anyone the impact this is having on staff and can therefore pass on vital information to senior management who are concerned about how the financial turmoil is going to affect their company.

"I get the feeling Susan is overwhelmed in her role. It is as if she is the only person in the organisation whom people can turn to with their distress. Susan seems willing to take on all the emotional fallout, but she needs to pace herself, know her limits, manage her own emotional energy and get some support for herself. She could bring in external support from a provider of workplace health coaching to deal with some of the most complex and sensitive employee situations. This specialist of coaching provides support to employees when a physical or mental health condition is likely to affect their work performance. She might benefit from coaching herself.

"Finally, I would suggest Susan equips other colleagues to join her in dealing with employee health issues. Currently, everyone is turning to her because they feel no one else can support them. A training programme for line managers in how to deal with distressed and ill employees would also relieve the burden on Susan. If she is able to gather a group of colleagues who are prepared to share the tasks, then they could form a support group to help share their experience, receive feedback and develop best practice for the organisation."

*Susan has asked for her name to be changed to protect her privacy. To read her account of the downturn, click HERE

Linda Hoyle is managing director of Workplace Potential, a provider of health and wellbeing services.