The Impact a Catering Area has on Hospitality Staff
There is a lot to be said about improving mental health awareness in the work environment, especially in the hospitality sector. Roles are varied and flexible, but they also come with long hours, unsociable shifts, and high stress levels. This has been exacerbated by social changes, including the global pandemic, the great resignation, and the current recession.
The good news is that mental health and wellbeing in the hospitality sector are taking priority like never before, and there is one factor that can have a significant impact on professionals – the space that they work in. A working area may not be designed with worker’s mental health in mind, or the purpose of the space might have changed over time, making it no longer suitable. Here’s what to consider when designing spaces for hospitality staff.
​
Treat the Kitchen like You Would an Office
The easier that an area is to work in, the smoother the working process will be for staff. This will ultimately result in higher job satisfaction and productivity. Typically, hospitality staff walk up to 10 times the average amount of steps in a day, and chefs can clock up between 15,000 and 20,000 steps in a 10–12 hour shift.
Therefore, it’s important to think about the layout of the kitchen – if a chef has to constantly walk back and forth to a fridge, this in turn slows down preparation and cooking time, putting extra pressure on the kitchen team to produce results.
We recently reviewed a scheme for a client’s kitchen, where the main walk-in fridge was the opposite side of the kitchen to the cold section. This would add unnecessary extra steps to the chef’s step count. And, on a separate scheme, we found a bar aimed to enable high-speed transactions. However, it was not set out in a working triangle – which remains the slickest way to design a kitchen. This will make service more clunky, and reduce speed, transactions and, consequently, revenue, making working conditions more stressful for staff.
If you put this in the context of working in an office, this is the equivalent to someone working in a separate room to their printer. It would take the staff longer to complete their work and unnecessarily increase their stress levels.
The office scenario is highly uncommon, however, when it comes to hospitality, it is common to look at the cost of equipment but disregard the impact factors such as wellbeing and staff retention. This is one factor we consider when designing hospitality areas. The layout of a kitchen ensures a smoother service, which ensures a more stress-free environment for staff – our greatest asset.
​
Working Conditions: Temperature and Light
There are simple steps you can take to improve a hospitality area, including considering temperature. Feeling too cold might not be the first thing that comes to mind – but many event kitchens are unheated as they already have ovens within them, this can mean that kitchens sometimes don’t rise to move than 10 degrees Celsius per day. As we go into summer, overheating in kitchens is another issue. There is currently no legal maximum temperature for working in kitchens, meaning that during a heatwave, staff can overheat. This leads to health conditions such as dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Another factor of consideration is natural light. We were in an architectural office discussing a project and the general conversation was about moving to a different office space, and how the office suggested had a small window and not enough natural light. Most kitchens, still rooms, cellars and back of house spaces are in the depths of buildings with only artificial light, and some venues require a five-minute walk for fresh air. Natural light has the potential to enhance people’s moods, creativity, and cognitive performance, so it is important to ensure a working space has appropriate lighting and temperature conditions.
​
Shift the Norm for Working Environments
With three quarters of hospitality workers reporting mental health concerns, we should be looking at what steps we can take to enhance the working environment. We can improve the hospitality area by considering how staff get from A to B, build in internal windows, add radio or speakers to the ceiling (music is proven to lift your mood), include a decent water, tea and coffee station so staff can stay hydrated, and ensure staff have a reasonable break area so that they can reset for their next shift.
Hospitality teams go above and beyond to make the guest experience incredible, so surely the staff break area should emulate the excellent food and drink culture of the rest of the building? Putting staff mental health and wellbeing first can potentially reduce turnover, increase productivity, and enhance communication between employees, so we try to improve the spaces that staff work in. The goal? Rather than hoping for an infinite talent pool to choose from, staff will stay for longer and remain happy and healthy in the workplace.