Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Stephen Hunt, Managing Director of Hunt Hospitality International. Now today, I’m going to touch on a very serious topic of the moment. And it’s the mechanics of the mind, it’s truly important to make sure that all of your team members are performing at their best. Now, how do you get them performing at their best when they feeling their best. So what we’ve set up at Hunt Hospitality is an employee assistance program. We’ve been successfully running it for two years now. And we’ve found that when a team member is feeling stressed, whether it be work, whether it be at home, they may have a new baby at home, or maybe having some family issues, we send them off to a team of trained psychologists who actually talk them through so they have a debrief, sometimes even maybe just a manager at work, who’s dealing with a lot of things in the workplace. Too many things, too many balls juggling in the air.
So basically, we send them off to the psychologist. Now, how does it work? So basically, we pay for three sessions, we actually we don’t know who goes and visits the psychologist that is confidential in nature between the patient and the psychologist. So it’s an employee and I go and see the psychologist, we don’t know who it is, unless they want to disclose that to us. So we prefer for them to deal directly with each other, and to work out some solutions, if the psychologist will let them know if they think it’s serious enough for them to go and see a psychiatrist. But the first step is to debrief with the psychologists. Now, how does that benefit your business? Okay, because you’re probably thinking, I’m a businessman, I’m struggling to look after myself.
How is this going to be better for me? Well, personally, it will be better for you as an individual, because you have the opportunity to have a debrief with an independent person, yourself. Now, that’s a good thing, because they don’t have any baggage of talking to your family or friends. They’re there purely to offer you solutions to your problems. And it may even just be a relief to have a chat. But so that’s the first benefit. The benefit for your team is that your team members actually have that independent advice. And the happier the team, obviously, the better and more productive they are for your business. And thirdly, it mitigates risk. So there’s less chance of your team actually, probably going off on stress leave or then having a worker’s compensation claim if you’re actually looking after them through the process of the employee assistance program, and looking after the mechanics of the mind.
Thanks very much everyone, keep the emails coming through and the phone calls coming in. I’ve enjoyed meeting a few new people and I look forward to talking to you next time.
