Some leisure and hospitality businesses are facing a perfect storm of psychological health and safety perils that are impacting the people they rely on to deliver sustainable business success and great customer experiences.
Many workers in leisure and hospitality are being exposed to hazards to their psychological health and safety at work, exacerbated by the twin pressures of inflation and labour shortages.
If your business is wrestling with rising food, drink and energy prices rises and lower head counts (either due to recruitment challenges or bids to keep costs lower), then you may be asking your remaining employees to do more. They may feel they have less control over their work, a workload that doesn’t support taking breaks and concerns over job security – all causes of work-related stress that employers have a duty of care to protect employees from.
Rising costs and shortfalls in the numbers of customer-facing staff, meanwhile, may leave customers feeling they are paying more for less. This can contribute to higher levels of dissatisfaction, bad reviews, complaints and even aggression.
When it comes to your talent, isolation as a result of home working or lone working could contribute to loss of connectedness and feelings of loneliness, particularly if they’re under pressure given the current economic backdrop.
In this insight, we offer practical ideas on how leisure and hospitality businesses can mitigate today’s risks and how investing in employee wellbeing supports long-term success.
Empowering workers to look out for each other and build resilience by providing training around stress and mental health awareness can be one way of supporting mental wellbeing.
Training can give your people the skills they need to recognise when they or their colleagues may be experiencing stress or poor mental health. It can empower them to provide support, understanding, build resilience and access appropriate help. Having open dialogues between colleagues around stress and mental health could be a line of defence against presenteeism and the cost of employees leaving due to poor mental health.
When you can’t always control the demands on your workforce, the support and relationships between staff are key. Line managers have a crucial role in promoting positive employee wellbeing and protecting psychological health and safety at work, including recognising the signs and symptoms of stress and poor mental health at work.
Research suggests getting this right means you may need to upskill managers. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) 2022 Health Wellbeing at Work report found only 38% of HR respondents agree that managers are confident in having sensitive discussions and signposting people to expert sources of help when needed. Even fewer (29%) agree managers are sufficiently confident and competent to spot the early warning signs of mental ill health. This isn’t surprising given that just over two-fifths (44%) of organisations are training managers to support staff with mental ill health.1
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guidelines for Mental Wellbeing at Work recommend offering systematic support for managers including training, and regular refresher training, in line management and communication skills. These skills include the ability to listen, communicate clearly, understand and empathise.2
In addition to training line managers, you could also consider other learning exercises to reduce the risk of harm to psychological health and safety, particularly to customer-facing staff. This might include education around dealing with conflict and aggressive customers.
How organisational change is managed and communicated can have a significant impact on employee wellbeing. Engaging frequently with employees around change in an inclusive manner can help. This can be particularly true around changes to technology.
For many leisure and hospitality businesses, the rapid rise of digital technologies has been one way they have coped with lockdowns and/or bounced back after society reopened. But change, if not communicated and consulted upon, can be one of the biggest causes of workplace stress.
Communicating change effectively means not making assumptions about what your people want or need to know. Consulting with employees to develop a deep understanding of their needs and concerns and providing timely feedback and support can have a positive impact on employee wellbeing and in turn loyalty.
While you may have seen recent commentary on themes such as employee ‘burnout’, it’s worth thinking beyond this and any other buzz phrases.
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 impose a requirement to risk assess, identify the hazards, assess and control the risks. The requirements cover assessing stress arising from the workplace and work systems. To comply with legislation, you need to truly understand what the issues are and introduce effective wellbeing support measures. You need to consult over and understand, any aspects of work that are impacting employees.
In this context, ‘burnout’ should be understood not as a medical diagnosis but a cluster of symptoms and an occupational phenomena linked to chronic workplace stress that is not being managed.3 It is, therefore, a factor that should be identified and managed through a thorough assessment of the range of risks to employee wellbeing.
Part of this assessment should include understanding how you manage and mitigate workplace stress. You should also examine your policies and procedures for identifying hazards and assessing risks to psychological health and safety.
As part of this, you might also consider your approach to training and competence, return to work procedures, and how you investigate and manage stress-related incidents.
Going beyond assumptions and buzzwords to understand where workers are currently exposed to harm is the first step to finding improvements.
At a strategic level, this might mean considering the impact of psychosocial risk on your risk register. At an operational level, this could mean documenting and recording controls and having processes to cascade best practice throughout the business.
By prioritizing your employees’ psychological health and safety, maybe more likely to win the battle for labour and talent and be better positioned to deliver the kinds of business models and experiences that support long-term success.
When it comes to customer-facing staff with a tendency towards rapid turnover, spending on measures such as training and upskilling line managers might feel like a ‘nice-to-have’. However, investing in training will help you meet your legal duty of care while also preventing those employees you’ve already invested in from leaving. It will also help differentiate your employee experience so you can recruit more effectively into the future.
For more insight on supporting employee wellbeing, download WTW’s Leisure and Hospitality Futures Report.
1 Health and Wellbeing at Work 2022, CIPD
2 Mental wellbeing at work, NICE
3 Burnout an “occupational phenomena,” World Health Organization
