This year, at WTCE’s Taste of Travel Theatre, Kris Hall, founder of The Burnt Chef Project — a social enterprise/not for profit that supports vulnerable people in the hospitality business with mental health issues — will lead a timely session alongside chef Adam Simmonds.
Chief Ambassador for The Burnt Chef Project, Scot Turner, will use this opportunity to chat about the not-for-profit while Adam Simmonds, one of Britain’s highest profile and awarded chefs, presents his very finest cuisine.
What is The Burnt Chef Project?
“The Burnt Chef project is a social enterprise dedicated towards tackling the stigmas associated with mental illness within hospitality, whilst also providing the education tools and supportive structures needed in order to ensure that our industry is sustainable. We’re focused on the people at the very heart of it.
What strikes me the most about working in this particular side of the industry is the level of professionalism and decorum that has to be presented all the time.
The servers will have to be at their best in terms of giving the best that they have to offer, and often enough this can be quite draining. So I think for me being able to be here and have this conversation with you now enables us to hopefully try and start to tackle the subtle nuances associated in the airline community.”
“Deloitte says that 40% of all turnover is down to mental illness.”
Kris Hall, Founder, The Burnt Chef Project
Could you introduce the topic and that will be covered in the session at the taste of Travel Theatre.
“The Burnt Chef project will be talking about all things mental health within hospitality, where we’ll be sharing some of our valuable insights into mental health in the current state of affairs within the hospitality community.
We’ll also be generating some top tips on how we can look after and manage our own mental health, as well as supporting that of our peers and colleagues.”
Who will this session be useful for?
“During this session, we’re gonna be talking about not just the tips on how to manage your own health and well-being, but we’re also going to be looking at some never seen before data specifically around psychological safety, presenteeism and burnout.
“There’s still a great lack of experience in actually managing mental health within the workplace and our environments.”
Kris Hall, Founder, The Burnt Chef Project
So this talk is going to be applicable to anyone who works in hospitality. If you’ve got a brain, then this is good for you! It will be useful for senior leaders and also key decision makers who are interested in learning about the impacts and the effects of mental illness on your organisation
You should definitely attend!”
What key takeaways will attendees get?
“For the first time in any sector, The Burnt Chef Project has been able to actually, clearly identify the true costs associated with presenteeism and the costs and the risks associated with burnout. There’s a lot of conversation around these subject matters, but we actually have scientifically backed data that shows us the real costs of inactivity in these areas.
We’ll also be discussing some general conversations around mental health and wellbeing within our sector, which is still a heavily stigmatised subject matter.
Hopefully attendees will leave not just learning the financial impacts on their organisation, but some things that they can do in order to start challenging stigma within their organisations as well.”
Where do you think the future of mental health in the hospitality industry is headed? What do you hope will change?
“The mental health conversation within hospitality is gaining a lot of momentum at this moment in time. But whilst the frequency of conversation has increased, there’s still a great lack of experience in actually managing mental health within the workplace and our environments.
One of the things that we work on a lot in the UK, the US and Canada are stress risk assessments within organisations which, in the UK, are a legal requirement. These are paramount to reducing high levels of workplace stress, which currently contributes to over half of all working days lost in the UK.
Hopefully we’re going to start to see more of those roll out, which not just have a benefit to the individuals within the organisations, but also increase profitability of them as well.
Moving forwards, we’d like to see more open dialogue, more support for this conversation. In reality — Deloitte says that 40% of all turnover is down to mental illness — the sooner that we start opening up dialogues, the sooner we can start empowering our team members to get support and manage their own health and wellbeing.
Then, the better we are in terms of creating a sustainable, people-focused industry.”
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