5 minutes with: Kathryn Austin, HRD, Pizza Hut Restaurants

HR Grapevine speaks to Pizza Hut's HR Director to get the low down on how they help employees who are tackling mental health problems...

How is the business incorporating mental health awareness into its training and development programmes – who will be trained, who needs to be trained, what do they need to know?

Around one in four people in the UK are affected by mental health problems every year but many of these will suffer in silence. As a hospitality business, we interact with people on a daily basis, and have an important role to play in providing the right support for employees and customers.

One of the ways we are putting mental health on our agenda is through training. We have deliberately taken a more holistic approach to training and development in order to teach our employees much more than the technical skills needed to do their job. We know that working in a restaurant environment can be high pressure and demanding at times, which why we dedicate part of our training to behavioural and emotional development.