Mental health has never been talked about more. However, the conversation about creating friendly work spaces, facilitating work-life balance and betting on actions that take care of employees has many benefits seems to have been left out of the kitchens. Data from the National Social Security Institute (INSS) place restaurants and commerce as the sector at the forefront of sick leave due to mental health between 2016 and June 2023. The schedules that characterize the hospitality industry, the difficulty in conciliating , the stressful nature of the services and harassment situations are some of the reasons. The fact that it is increasingly pointed out may be due to greater awareness in the population about these issues and to the increased awareness in Health regarding diagnoses.
Several studies, including one carried out by the professional services company Aon in more than 1,100 companies in 46 countries, indicate that improving well-being factors increases performance between 11% and 55%. Talking about performance sounds very cold, but when you unpack the benefits resulting from investing in these aspects, obvious improvements come to light: more health and resilience; retention and attraction of talent, thanks to a stronger sense of belonging to the workforce; more agility on a day-to-day basis and long-term sustainability. What happens in the hospitality industry? “We have been able to start investing in the quality of life of our workers when we have achieved a certain stability. These improvements have long-term results, it is normal that in hospitality it costs more to prioritize them,” says Aaron Ortiz (1995, Irurzun), chef and founder of the Kabo restaurant with Jaione Aizpurua (1993, Auza).
She is the head of the restaurant in Pamplona and is clear that working on well-being starts from understanding your workers as people, knowing their personal realities, their concerns and fears, their desires and aspirations. “And in the same way we present ourselves to them. We are transparent and sincere. We already related like this before. Now we choose to pay a therapist for the entire team—we believe that being well individually makes us better as a group—and taking everyone on trips, to training, visits and events,” says Aizpurua. They have been working with her for a year, concerned about the increase in stress, anxiety and depression problems and today, they are convinced that it has been a correct decision: their team is safer and more confident, internal communication has greatly improved and problems are solved much sooner and more comfortably.
A place where they have been working with a psychology professional for more than ten years is the Celler de Can Roca. Inma Puig (1954, Barcelona), specialist in the creation, training and development of high-performance teams, “appears at a time when there were no such actors in gastronomy. With it we work in teams, it helps us to know each other better, to understand the realities of others and to better manage stressful situations,” says Joana Pedret (1995, Viladecavalls), Director of Human Resources at the restaurant. “For us it is an essential approach. We ask for excellence and we understand that our staff also demands it from us. Furthermore, for seven years we have been working with double staff to cover morning and afternoon shifts. Spoken like this it seems very rigid, but everything starts from the intention of accompanying, understanding and guiding whoever comes to our house.”
The restaurant’s organizational structure is traditionally hierarchical, however, there are other ways of understanding teams that allow greater communication and give more autonomy to employees. This shows it Deluz and Company, a sustainable restaurant group with Cantabrian roots, which has managed to form a team of more than 160 people with an average stay of 6 years depending on the establishment. This level of retention has a reason. Carlos and Lucía Zamora began working with the TEAL method in 2017. Eleven years earlier they had already been born as a social company—working with local producers, facilitating conciliation, working with diverse and inclusive workforces—but after a complicated season, they decided that they needed a radical change. Looking for alternative forms of organization they found one that decentralized control and hierarchical power and distributed it among all the company’s workers.
![Team from the restaurant La vaquería montañesa, from the Deluz y Compañía group, in Madrid.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/P3BFPNIQW5AENOXFJLODQMT5HI.jpeg?auth=f283e2ba840468a79c8d41fd47bbb79ae8b71aa6d5e227b53699ba0a415a2edc&width=414)
TEAL is based on three principles: giving teams autonomy to make decisions taking into account collective intelligence; connect with the well-being of the people who make up the organization, taking into account the emotional; and the evolutionary purpose of the organization. “Through many internal trainings in conflict resolution and non-violent communication, we are able to deal with problems and make changes in a much more agile and effective way, as well as in a kind and empathetic way,” says Eva Miguelez (1976, Torrelavega), a professional in teams in TEAL methodology. “The result is a complete transformation of the way we work and organize, in which workers feel responsible, autonomous and even transfer these lessons to their lives outside of work.” Another key to the method is transparency. “All our accounts are shared with the staff, we make decisions in an assembly and we distribute 30% of the annual profit among all workers,” says Zamora.
All of these initiatives have several points in common that, according to Iván Frutos, trainer and disseminator in human sustainability, are key to creating a healthy work environment: they promote open communication – listening and being heard -, they promote a balance between work and personal life, They create support spaces—conversation groups and wellness activities—and continually train the team. On his initiative, The Burnt Chef Project, communicates about the problems in the sector regarding mental health, giving voice to a current reality, as well as hope and resources to act. More and more hoteliers are proposing a restaurant that looks more inward, putting the focus on the people who build the project. What if the well-being and health of the internal customer were considered as a criterion for rating restaurants?
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