5 ways you can use Youda to improve wellbeing in your front line teams

Working in hospitality isn’t easy. According to our friends at The Burnt Chef Project, 4 out of 5 hospitality professionals report having at least one mental health issue in their career.

Indeed, research from Cambridge University suggests that hospitality has some of the highest rates of mental health issues. Dr Shanquan Chen from their Department of Psychiatry says: 

“Jobs that involve working face to face with the public, particularly where the employee has a degree of responsibility, and those that involve working irregular and long hours can all be emotionally demanding or even expose employees to violence and verbal aggression. This in turn could contribute to higher rates of mental health problems.”

So it’s really encouraging to see that hospitality companies of all sizes are investing in better mental health support for their teams. Having an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) in place now seems pretty standard. Lots more companies are offering mental health first-aid training for managers and ambassadors, and leaders across the industry seem to be role modelling a much more healthy approach to work/life balance and wellbeing.

But if I’m honest, I think we’re still being too reactive. 

Still waiting for mental health issues to escalate into a crisis before we take it seriously. 

And above all, we seem to want to address this with individual interventions rather than trying to rewire the system.

So here are 5 ways Youda can help you build a system that improves mental health in your front line teams.

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1. Nudging employees towards support as early as possible

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One of our customers uses Youda to deliver a quick weekly check-in survey for all their front line teams. Within this survey are a couple of questions designed to identify potential mental health needs. 

If an employee answers these questions in a way that indicates they might be suffering with anxiety, depression or exhaustion, then they get a follow-up message from the Youda bot reminding them of the EAP support provided by the company and how to speak to a trained mental health volunteer.

In our view, this is a perfect example of how you can use Youda’s automations to improve the employee experience. 

You can tell all your employees about your EAP when they first join, but they might not remember it’s available when they actually need it.

And you can train your managers to be more aware of mental health needs, but they don’t work every shift with every team member and they’re very unlikely to be able to spot issues unless someone comes to them asking for help.

A quick bot message sent when the need is first identified could make all the difference. It’s discreet and private. And it’s easy to act on. Above all, it means employees can get a nudge towards support before things escalate into a crisis. 

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2. Youda can help you spot the contextual and systemic factors that may be creating mental health problems

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It’s possible that your ways of working may be making people sick. Double shifts. Long periods of time without taking holiday. Not getting two days off in a row. Working unsociable shift patterns. Being part of a team that has strained or stressful relationships. Not feeling like you have the skills required to do the job you’re being asked to do… all these factors could undermine someone’s mental health.

The clever AI that sits behind Youda can help you identify these causal relationships. Once you know what’s causing the wellbeing issues in your company and the impact on your business, you can be really precise and data-led in how you try and fix them. 

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3. Help managers to respond to the different needs of their people

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Managing people is tough. Managing a diverse, multi generational team, with different needs and different experiences can be really tough.

One of the challenges with the traditional way in which we deliver workshop based wellbeing and inclusion training is that you’re expecting your managers to retain a lot of information and to be able to recall it when they need it… which may be months or years later!

Let’s take menopause as a quick example. You might decide you want to do a better job of understanding and supporting the needs of employees going through the menopause. So you send all your managers on a 2 hour menopause awareness workshop. 

Now the workshop might be great, but I suspect a proportion of the managers attending will be sat there thinking it’s not relevant to them. They might not have anyone on their team who’s in that demographic. In fact, in some hospitality businesses, it’s possible they might never have managed someone going through the menopause. Let’s be honest, if that’s the case, they’ll probably be a bit cynical about whether this is a good use of their time and they’re probably not going to retain a great deal of the training. So two years later, when they do hire someone who might be going through the menopause, they’re not going to be able to recall or apply the learning.

With Youda you can use the data we have on the system to create a recommendation engine.

So you could set up an automation that scans a team’s profile and their feedback, and then sends managers a message from the bot saying: “Hi Dan, we’ve had a look at the profiles of the people on your team and we thought you might find these resources helpful…”

It can then nudge the manager towards training material on how to support people with menopause, neurodiversity, anxiety, returning from maternity leave… etc etc depending on the profiles and needs of the team.

So managers get exposed to the training when they need it and when they have a live example they can apply the learning to. And that makes it much more likely the training will have the intended impact.

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4. Share stories that shift the cultural norms

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We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a stigma around mental health. 

This HBR article suggests that one way of addressing this is to share stories about employees who’ve accessed mental health services to ‘normalise' it.

I think these stories can be anonymised, but just giving people an example like “I recently started feeling a bit anxious at work. I wasn’t really sure why, but I started getting knots in my stomach and it was affecting my sleep. I called the EAP helpline and spoke to someone about it and it really helped”. 

One of the things we try to encourage with Youda, is to make sure you have feedback loops in place for all your key employee experiences. So if someone goes on a training programme or accesses a service, Youda can automatically follow up and capture a bit of feedback or a story about the experience, which you can then use to learn from or share with others.

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5. Make sure people can switch off when they’re outside of work

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Such a simple one, but so hard to do. Most hospitality businesses are a 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year operation.

If you use something like WhatsApp for team communications, it’ll constantly be pinging away. And it’s very difficult to switch off from work if you’re also using WhatsApp to chat to your mates.

If you use the new Youda mobile app for team chat and we’re integrated into your rota application, then it’s easy for team members to set it up so Youda can read their schedule and automatically designate them as away from work when they’re not on shift.

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If you’d like to chat about how Youda could improve your employees' wellbeing, please click here.