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Prioritizing everyone’s mental health, too

(Editor’s note: This marks the second of a three-part series by Ken Greger, partner, global executive search firm August Leadership, New York City, on the importance of an emotional recovery plan as the industry bounces back from COVID-19. Read Part 1 here.)

As stated earlier, dealing with the pandemic and industry shutdown was emotional for hospitality company leaders, too, but those who were transparent about being untried in navigating such a pandemic built – or reinforced – their credibility and, thus, were trusted. It was quite the test.

Take Craig Smith, group president and managing director for Marriott’s International Division:

My anxiety from the COVID shutdown is different, obviously, because if I only have 50% of my pay for a year or even if I don’t get paid for a year, my family and I are still okay. My anxiety is more based on a feeling of stewardship. The people who work for me are my responsibility, just like my kids. If I don’t do my job well, more people lose their jobs, or more people can’t retain their jobs. It’s been a big stressor for me, being up all night thinking, ‘How’s this affecting everybody?’

I’ve been through a tsunami in Thailand, a bombing, two hurricanes and all sorts of crises, some you can prepare for and some that hit when you aren’t ready. You make it through the crisis and spend a lot of time taking care of people and taking care of business and everything else. COVID was different because we didn’t know where the end was. In fact, our prediction was that the situation was going to last three to six months, so we made decisions based on that at the beginning, and our decisions were wrong. It’s vital to be honest with the people that work for you, but also genuine, so I told them, ‘We made this decision and we got it wrong.’ This was important. We shared a lot of that.

Let’s be thoughtful about what we’ve learned from this experience and move forward with empathy. In a business that serves people through people, it’s pretty clear where the core value lies. The workers have always known this, but now they will expect their leadership to step up, acknowledge what needs to be different moving forward, and take action.

In other words, the mental health and well-being of your people must be seen as holding as high a priority as the bottom line. Clearly, Hotel 101 suggests the two are forever intertwined anyway. It’s imperative to grasp the emotional damage COVID-19 has caused, and to invest the time – and the money – to understand and address the needs of your people. They have had a lot of time to reflect on what matters to them, and about whether or not they liked their job or their employer.  If you want to attract and retain, it will take an authentic effort to revisit your company’s values – not the ones nicely framed on the wall; the ones that were actually in force when the pandemic hit.

Psychiatrist Dost Öngür, MD, PhD, Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital, and his colleagues, Roy Perlis, MD, MSc and Donald Goff, MD, offered this medical perspective last year:

The pandemic is causing great distress in society and this is translating into increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders. This trend is likely to continue. Psychiatry has been called on to lead efforts to treat these disorders and alleviate psychiatric disorders and distress, but this will necessitate close collaboration with primary care physicians and those in other specialties as well as renewed support and investment from society. 

To be an employer of choice in the future, hospitality companies – any company, really – must drop the notion of returning to “business as usual.” There will be no such thing, but perhaps that is for the better. We all know that humans don’t come with switches, so we shouldn’t expect anything overnight. When the pandemic is over, the healing will begin. And there is a lot of healing to be done. Here’s another reflection from Viceroy Hotel Group CEO Bill Walshe:    

I think that the emotional healing you’re talking about is extremely important. There are a lot of organizations who have spoken with a great degree of anxiousness about the impact of the pandemic on them commercially, on revenues and profits – and so they should, as we’re all here to do a job. However, I think progressive organizations have put their people first and have asked ‘How do we keep our people healthy?’ In a service industry, when you have colleagues that have one-to-one interactions with guests, it’s about making sure that there are updated and actively implemented policies and procedures to fulfill our obligation to keep our colleagues safe and well. So, in our case, I think we put in place just over 600 new processes across the company, specific to COVID and specific to keeping people safe.

Not enough time is spent talking about it; it’s not just physical health. The mental anguish, the mental health consequences for people in every business, but for sure in the hospitality business, has been extraordinary. I saw the immediacy of this impact back at the beginning. Imagine when people were out of a job with 24-hours’ notice, and then restrictions were lifted and people got called back to work, and it was like, ‘Hallelujah, I can now start to worry less about paying my rent or feeding my kids,’ or whatever it is. And then people didn’t wear masks and they didn’t socially distance and numbers went up. So, the liberties that had been introduced were taken away again, and lockdowns occurred again. Imagine all of these folks who’d been through the trauma of furlough, then the euphoria of being recalled, were thrust back into what was an even more negative trauma because it was happening again and they’d thought we were through this.

And then you have the few people who got to stay behind, people like me, who were lucky to have continuity of employment. But there’s an equivalent that I’ve seen in this and other organizations, and that’s when survivor guilt sets in. If you truly have empathy for those people who have been negatively affected by these circumstances, and you’re not one of them, you’re thinking, ‘Well, it’s not fair.’ And then you wonder, ‘What can I do, using the privilege that I have of continued employment, to try to create circumstances that will benefit those who are out of employment and bring them back?’ It’s incredibly frustrating. So, I think that it’s been an extremely emotional time where there has not been adequate emphasis placed on giving people the opportunity to express that emotion and to have conversations. And I think that the consequences of that will be felt for a long time, even after businesses stabilize.

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