Supply chain issues, Covid lockdowns, and the current round of staff and skills shortages have all shone a spotlight on the mental health challenges which can affect those working in the high-pressure environment of modern hospitality. Depression and anxiety are common issues, underscoring the need for foodservice workers and business owners to build resilience and self-reliance.

While organisations like Lifeline, Beyond Blue and RUOK provide a plethora of online resources and assistance, it’s harder to find spokespeople and support teams specific to foodservice or drawn from its ranks. One example is Mal Meiers, a young chef who has worked as an RUOK ambassador and spoken out on his own battles with depression and anxiety in an effort to educate and upskill our industry leaders in dealing with mental health concerns.

Chefs suffer from ‘a lack of connections’

Currently working as Production Manager at The Wonky Loaf Bakery on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, Mal was involved in a number of fundraising initiatives and awareness raising of mental health issues for a variety organisations pre-Covid, and is currently one of the headline riders in the Hope Cycle Tour of Australia presented by Lifeline.

He argues that a lot of the mental health issues chefs in particular face in the industry stem from a lack of connections: “Many people will move away from their family base to study or work, and that’s not an issue exclusive to hospitality, it’s something that affects all young people trying to find their way in the world. But hospitality compounds the problem by the long hours you have to work – and when I was coming up as a chef there was a definite mentality that unless you’re dying or in need of hospitalisation, you’re expected to front up and get on with it, no matter what,” he recalls.

“If you don’t have anything to fall back on and that world falls apart, it doesn’t leave you with anything”

— Mal Meiers

“As a young chef, I threw the whole kitchen sink at my job – I did whatever I could to be a better version of myself, but I wasn’t looking after other areas of my life. I thought being a chef defined who I was, and that’s fairly common – it's not a conscious thing, you don't actively say ‘I'm solely going to focus on cooking and let my health decline and not engage with relationships’. It's more that you may have ambition or ego; for me it was wanting to be a better chef every day, and I thought the only way to do that was to expose myself to it more and more, but I realise now that isn’t actually sustainable. You need to have other things in your life.

“If you don't have anything to fall back on and that world falls apart, it doesn't leave you with anything. It took me to the brink of my existence to learn that lesson. I had anxiety for the longest time and I didn't really know how to address it - I sought help and people said stop drinking coffee, stop drinking alcohol, exercise more, cut out sugar. As a chef you think, I can't give up coffee because I work 15 hours a day, how else can I get energy?

“Another issue is there’s a point at which you become a good chef, but then you become a head chef. And you may be well trained as a good chef who can cook really well and manage their time, but then all of a sudden you're managing people, and we’re not taught how to do that. With chefs I use the analogy of working in an Italian restaurant: the easiest pasta to make is linguini alla olio but if you don't get the ingredient ratios right you’ll have either a soup or an oily mess. And so you have to be taught how to do it.

“It’s the same with managing people: we're not taught how to do it, we go through this process of becoming a really good chef then all of a sudden we're thrust into this environment and it's assumed we can lead, empower people and also look after them, and in fact the options for that kind of training are expensive and time consuming and even if you have the money to do it you can't necessarily find the time. So you end up with people in roles with expectations they can't meet, and communication and empathy about these things is lacking. This is still an area where it’s tough to talk about it.”

“If you go and ask someone ‘are you OK?’ without a pre-existing relationship with them you’re not necessarily going to get an honest answer”

Mal argues open communication and a good working environment are key to better management of mental health in hospitality: “As a chef, you need to take the time to grow your team and grow with them. Without communication it’s hard to have empathy, or understanding or a situation. One of the big things is to check in with people and make sure they’re all right, but if you go and ask someone ‘are you OK?’ without a pre-existing relationship with them you’re not necessarily going to get an honest answer.

“In many places the head chef walks in, they’ve got so much work to do, they may notice someone’s struggling, making lots of mistakes, they may ask ‘are you OK?’ but the person’s in such a state of anxiety that all they’re thinking is ‘oh no, my boss knows I’m making mistakes’ and they put up a wall. Whereas what I used to do with my staff, even as a 2IC, was walk in, make coffees for everyone, say hello, ask how their day is going. That way I knew that if anyone needed help they’d be more likely to come to me.

“But if you have a situation where there’s no communication and no pre-existing relationship, just a hierarchical environment, then there’s no opportunity to have that conversation.

“Another thing I would say is never assume anyone is a bad person – people are usually trying to do the best they can, so you have to give them the benefit of the doubt and understand their situation before you try to paint them as the devil. If you don’t do that you’ll never get to the bottom of what they may be going through.

“You can easily go off at someone, call them lazy because they’ve left dirty dishes at the end of their shift, but it could be because they’d lost an oven for an hour – if you’ve got three working decks instead of four it can put you back a lot of time. But if you don’t take the time to have the conversation you need to have, you’re setting yourself up for a negative cycle.”

Foster open communication, support and resilience

Steve Sidd of Catering HQ, which runs the food offerings in a range of clubs across NSW, says “there’s really nothing out there specific to the hospitality industry in terms of mental health support, so it’s up to you to engage with your staff, because their mental health is really important to your business.”

Consequently Steve is committed to fostering open communication, support and resilience among his staff through regular team-building activities and related initiatives. “Because we operate across so many different locations throughout the state, we do multiple clusters of bringing our teams together. First we do venue by venue – we’ll select different ones and do team building activities with staff, whether that’s on the Central Coast or the Northern Beaches. We’ll pull both the back of house and front of house staff together to go bowling, play golf, have a picnic, a game of tennis – we do that once a quarter, usually early in the week so we can maximise participation. We also try to bring everyone in the group, all 420 staff, together once or twice a year. We’ve taken them to wine tastings in the Hunter Valley, to suppliers’ farms on field trips.

“Take the time to go for a walk, go to the gym, do some meditation – that’s how I get through my role”

— Steve Sidd

“It’s all about getting everyone together and out of the usual work environment. Our philosophy at Catering HQ is that whoever works for the company is part of the family. That’s what we’re all about, in that we call ourselves a family business, and that’s how we engage with our staff. We offer staff incentives like movie tickets for our Staff Member of the Month; we’re dedicated to showing our appreciation for what they do.

“During Covid and then into last year, we were running with a skeleton staff and people were working really long and hard hours, so it was really tough. This year we reset ourselves and brought back things we used to do pre-Covid, like getting staff a lot more involved in the business rather than just working the hard slog.”

Think about staff’s ongoing wellbeing

Steve emphasises that fostering mental health is not just a question of keeping staff engaged over the short term; you need to be thinking about their ongoing wellbeing. “Every time we have a group training session with all staff, the first thing I say is we're all here to focus on the best food, the best quality stands, but there's one more important thing I need from you, and that's to look after your own wellbeing. Take the time to go for a walk, go to the gym, do some meditation – that’s how I get through my role, because obviously I feel that pressure as well, and I try to bring that to their understanding too. So I practice what I preach – I go for my runs, go to the gym at five in the morning. And when I go from venue to venue I sit down to talk to them and the first thing I say is how are you doing, how’s your personal life.

“We also make sure we don’t divide our teams – it doesn’t matter if someone works in admin, in the kitchen, on the floor, elsewhere within the company, we’re all equal. Everyone’s working for the same goal, one dream one team, and we really drive that to bring everyone together.

“We mentor our frontline staff so if someone’s not performing, rather than coming down tough and disciplined we try to understand what’s going on with them”

“We’ll also do separate leadership team building – we have a corporate trainer who comes in and trains our leadership team, and again there’s a focus on how we performance-manage our staff. We need to be mindful that we don’t necessarily know what’s going on in their personal lives – we mentor our frontline staff so if someone’s not performing, rather than coming down tough and disciplined we try to understand what’s going on with them, empathise with them and then determine how we can best engage with them and manage things.”

Steve makes the point that these kinds of initiatives need not necessarily be expensive to run or rely on external trainers. “Hospitality is made up of small, medium and larger sized business and we’re quite a decent sized group, but you can do smaller scale versions of these initiatives. Team building can be as simple as taking your team down to the park, going on a walk together, doing something socially – it doesn’t have to be expensive, it’s just about getting people together, engaging with them and remembering there’s life outside of work. It doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. We’ve got beautiful beaches and parks in Australia and we can take advantage of them. But sometimes there’s so much that needs to be done we get caught up in our day to day activities too much and forget about our overall wellbeing. So we need to bear that in mind and give ourselves the chance to reset.”