The coronavirus crisis has put unprecedented amounts of stress not only on health care systems and economies but on workers’ mental health.
That’s the first and bottom line of a recent study by the Society of Human Resource Managers.
The professional association surveyed more than a thousand workers in mid-April and found that nearly half feel emotionally drained from their work. The younger the employee, the more likely they feel burned out.
Employees who feel totally sapped of energy are more prone to depression.
As state and local economies reopen amid the threat of COVID-19, citizens are getting back to daily living. But people are not the same as they were before the pandemic struck, experts say, and the nation’s workplaces may be where mental health issues become most obvious.
In this episode of Lodging Leaders, we focus on mental health in the workplace – particularly the hospitality industry which has been dramatically impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Featured in this report are Silpa Patel, a hotelier in Tennessee who has battled depression and now works with behavioral health organizations to eliminate the stigma of mental illness; Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Foundation in Washington, D.C.; Wendi Safstrom, executive director of the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation in Alexandria, Va.; and Marjorie Morrison, co-founder and CEO of Psych Hub in Nashville, Tennessee.
Resources and Links
Lodging Econometrics has tracked the hotel industry since 1998. Its global database includes new-hotel pipelines as well as renovations and brand conversions. Hotel franchisers once eager to launch new brands are focused on converting existing hotels because it’s a faster way to recover revenue lost to the COVID-19 pandemic than through new construction. In Episode 346, Lodging Leaders explores the increasing number of conversions in the U.S. hotel industry and what owners and operators need to consider before repositioning an asset.
In the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., financiers anticipated a swell of distressed hotel businesses. Some raised rescue funds to respond to what they thought was a pending crisis. Though there are financial rescues taking place, the level of such activity is far below what industry advisers and fund managers expected. Commercial real estate investors positioned to act in the early days of the pandemic held off and are now just beginning to unleash their cash hoards totaling billions of dollars. Episode 345 of Lodging Leaders podcast explores the state of capital investment in the hotel industry.