Mental health and resilience – are you doing enough in your food and drink business?
14 May 2021As it’s Mental Health Awareness Week we caught up with award-winning health and wellbeing practitioner Tracy Duggan about why wellbeing and resilience support is so important for your employees, especially right now with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tracy will be running a workshop for food and drink businesses – Building a resilient workforce to plan for new ways of working – next Wednesday 19 May for the Business Gateway.
As a business owner, you may have staff coming back from furlough or that continued to work throughout last year. Consider how they might be feeling right now, post lockdown – is there anxiety about coming into work, are they feeling safe around others?
It’s important people have the ability to support themselves and equally knowing what you as the business owner can do to help them.
Tracy says: “The resilience of your team impacts on your business performance and there are lots of business benefits to giving this area some serious thought. Helping to build resilience will contribute towards lower sickness and absences, better customer satisfaction and higher productivity – to name a few.”
The cost to employers runs into the billions for things like absenteeism, staff turnover and presenteeism. In fact last year it cost employers between £33 and 42 billion!
Literally, overnight wellbeing has shot up the agenda due to Covid-19 and businesses are making changes with 70% doing some kind of support activity and 50% introducing a wellbeing strategy.
So how do you go about making changes and where do you start? Tracy says staff surveys and talking to your people is a good place to see where you are now and also measure progress after activity.
There are four areas you could consider based on the work of Dr Ian Hesketh and Prof Sir Cary Cooper of Alliance Manchester Business School:
- Psychological – what are they thinking, do they think they are safe?
- Societal – how do you create trust and teamwork within the business?
- Physiological – the physical space, is it covid secure, have risk assessments taken place (this is where your food standards, health and safety policies come in)
- Fiscal – financial areas i.e. be mindful some have been on reduced wages and the impact this may have had on their wellbeing.
There are strategies you can put into place to cover these areas. For example, on the physical side, could you encourage lunchtime team walks or taking proper breaks, or on the financial side – have you done salary benchmarking, what are their benefits packages and is this being communicated?
Well-being needs to be part of your business culture and starts with the leadership team. Everyone should know what direction you are going in through your vision and values – and it will be these values that shape the behaviours across the organisation when it comes to resilience and wellbeing.
Finally, Tracy adds: “The good news is that most organisations have recognised the importance of building a resilient workforce and you may already have a framework to drive that culture of support. Little changes can be made and it doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s about making progress, not perfection.”
If you are a food and drink business in Leicester or Leicestershire and need some help in this area please join Tracy for her workshop on Wednesday. This will be an interactive session where you will come away with some actions for your business.
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