Investigating the Effects of Pandemic Related Workplace Changes on the Wellbeing of Ontario’s Food Hospitality and Food Retail Employees

Food hospitality and food retail businesses underwent considerable transformations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These alterations have the potential to affect how individuals in these industries engaged with their workplaces. This thesis identifies how COVID-19 transformed food hospitality and food retail businesses in Ontario and investigates how these changes altered employee wellbeing. The experiences of 39 staff members across these two industries were collected via semi-structured interviews that took place between June 2020 and May 2021. Grounded theory analysis was used to explore this dataset and a distinct theoretical frame emerged for the food retail and food hospitality industries respectively. Results demonstrate that for food hospitality employees their workplaces provided a combination of benefits and threats to wellbeing. In contrast, food retail employees emphasized the imbalance that existed between their perceived efforts and rewards. Future studies should consider investigating how these workplaces might be adapted to better support employee wellbeing

The workplace as a therapeutic landscape: Understanding the effects of COVID-19 on the wellbeing of food hospitality employees

This study investigated the pandemic-related modifications to food hospitality businesses in Ontario, Canada and their effects on the health and wellbeing of workers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 food hospitality employees in Ontario between June 2020 and May 2021 as part of the Food Retail Environment Study for Health and Economic Resiliency (FRESHER). Transcripts were analyzed inductively using grounded theory as a means of allowing themes to be distilled organically from this relatively new area of research. Therapeutic landscapes emerged as a framework for the resultant themes. The three main themes in this analysis are compromised based on the physical, social, and symbolic spaces of a therapeutic landscape: physical aspects of food hospitality businesses as influencers of wellbeing, social relationships as sources of support and stress, and symbols of fear and safety within food hospitality workplaces. Results indicate that, for food hospitality employees, the workplace was an imperfect therapeutic landscape with a mix of benefits and threats to wellbeing. Further study is needed to understand how these spaces might be reconstructed to better promote wellbeing