Spa Executive_MARCH-2021-V3

MANAGEMENT
Employee stress is a factor in
hospitality and your team’s
wellbeing is as important as that
of your guests. Here’s how to
make a difference.
We spoke to Ryan Wolf, Gallup’s Physical Wellbeing Lead, about
how hospitality leaders can apply those five principles to alleviate
employee stress, improve wellbeing, and create healthy, happy
workplaces. Here’s how he answered our questions.
HOW MANAGERS CAN
REDUCE EMPLOYEE STRESS
IN SPA & HOSPITALITY
Working in spa and hospitality is stressful. Work is
demanding and the pressure to offer the ultimate
guest experience while keeping up with safety
protocols can be a lot to handle. Burnout, as we all
know, is not uncommon.
Moreover, a recent report found that travel and
hospitality employees are the least likely out of
all industries surveyed to feel valued at work. And
separate research found that feeling undervalued
at work was correlated with the highest levels of
workplace stress. In other words: hospitality is
already a stressful sector, and the common feeling
of being undervalued adds stress to that stress.
The five elements we need to thrive
This costs hospitality companies. Stress has been
called the “health epidemic of the 21st century” by
the World Health Organization and the “business
world’s silent killer” by Forbes. It’s estimated to cost
American businesses alone up to $300 billion a year.
The hospitality world is very focused on creating a
stress-free guest experience and on guest wellbeing.
Managers should also be sure to spend time and
energy on the wellness and wellbeing of their
employees.
Employee wellbeing matters for your
wellness business
Advisory company Gallup studied wellbeing in more
than 98% of the world’s population and identified
five common elements that people need to thrive in
their professional and personal lives. Gallup found
that how employees rate these five elements affects
business outcomes:
Career: You like what you do every day.
Social: You have meaningful friendships in your life.
Financial: You manage your money well.
Community: You like where you live.
Physical: You have energy to get things done.
What’s the manager’s role in
employee wellbeing?
Workplace wellness started as a way
for employers to shed some of their
increasing healthcare costs. So, a lot of
the initiatives were to help employees
lose weight or get more exercise.
But workplace wellness has evolved
tremendously over the past 30-40 years,
and now integrates all determinants
of health and happiness. It’s not just
going to the gym and eating broccoli, it’s
thinking about how your relationships
and your career support your health.
Leadership needs to have a strategy for
wellbeing and managers can make or
break that strategy. It can be challenging
because they don’t necessarily want to
be a wellbeing expert or a life coach for
their employees. But they don’t need
to be the experts. They just need to
be conduits and good dot connectors
to help identify available resources
based upon specific needs. Sometimes
these resources are available through
programs already available in the
organization, and sometimes they are
outside the organizations. Everyone
has a special wellbeing need. Our
needs are as individualized as we are
individual human beings. Recognizing an
individual’s needs and supporting them
in finding the resources they need is the
manager’s role.
How do the five elements Gallup
identified factor in?
Physical wellbeing is often the first
pathway people focus on, but now we
think of physical wellbeing as efficiently
managing your energy so you can
take care of the important things in
your life: having creative and mental
energy for work and emotional energy
for relationships. The work we do,
the passion that we pour into it, the
purpose and meaning that we get out
of our work, our relationships and
friendships, are all very important
for longevity, physical wellbeing, and
happiness.
Can you talk about ways to
avoid burning out employees?
Gallup also identified five
major reasons that people burn
out: being treated unfairly, an
unmanageable workload, a lack of
expectations within their role, lack of
communication, and unreasonable
time pressure. It’s the responsibility of
leaders to address these issues.
We’ve also found four elements
that employees need from leaders.
These are hope, stability, trust, and
compassion. Leaders should be
intentional about these things. Caring
about people is very simple. It comes
down to caring about people more
than just their productive units and
knowing that engagement at work
is highly linked and correlated to
wellbeing.
How can managers lift some of
the employee stress their teams
are experiencing right now?
Being communicative, helping
people understand what’s expected
of them, and being clear about the
organization’s financial situation and
what the plans are going forward are
very important at this time.
Another thing is playing to the
strengths of each individual employee
and understanding what makes them
tick and the kind of work in which they
thrive. Identify that setting and help
them develop by doing more of that.
CliftonStrengths is a tool that we
use to help individuals identify their
strengths. There are four domains
of strengths: relationship building,
strategic thinking, influencing, and
executing. Someone who is a really
high executer likes to get things
done. They might like checklists
and just doing hard work. It wouldn’t
necessarily be wise to have that
person at the front desk of the hotel
or spa, checking people in and making
small talk. We’d want to put someone
who thrives in relationship building
and influencing in front of people. So,
they can be more of who they are and
help the clientele feel comfortable.
What makes a great employee
wellness experience?
We need to think about who these
individuals are and help them carve a
path to explore and experiment with
ways to live their best life. Rather
than providing programs that try to fit
everyone in a box, we should be giving
people the autonomy to experiment
with what might work best for them.
Spa Executive MARCH 2021 ISSUE - 10 - - 11 - Spa Executive MARCH 2021 ISSUE