Family-owned bakery doesn't sugarcoat stress of working through COVID-19

For Blair Hyslop, the 200 workers behind Atlantic Canada's largest family-owned bakery are hardworking and dedicated, but the past nine months have tested them all.

Hyslop saidthere havebeen some outbursts and behaviours that were completely out of character.

And he saidfeelings of anxiety are rising again, "now that everybody knows someone who is getting tested or self-isolating."

Hyslop is protective of his employees and their privacy but agreed to speak in general terms about how the pandemic has been affecting his staff, his business and himself.

"People need to know that everybody's facing these challenges, that they're not alone," said Hyslop, who purchased the Sussex, New Brunswick-based Mrs. Dunster's in 2014, with his wife, Rosalyn, who is co-CEO.

"On the one hand, you're trying to be flexible and compassionate while you're also trying to keep the business going and make payroll next Friday. It's a stressful time to own a business in this world."

1 in 4 employees didn't come in

As a food production company, Mrs. Dunster's employees are deemed essential workers. People are needed on the bakery floor to make fresh breads, biscuits and donuts that must then be packaged and shipped around the region.

"A lot of other people were being allowed to stay home and collect benefits, but our folks were being asked to come to work and go into a building with lots of people and stand next to them and make things," said Hyslop. "That created a lot of anxiety."

There was also a rush to reconfigure workflow and workspace and while management made a real effort to "over-communicate" why it was needed to keep people safe, Hyslop saidit was almost too much to absorb.

"We were literally on the bakery floor with masking tape at midnight trying to figure out distancing," he said.

"That created a lot of stress for employees who came in the next morning and all of a sudden, where they've been, things that they've been doing in places they've been standing, what they were allowed to do and what entrance they were allowed to use, and what bathrooms, and where they were allowed to eat ... everything changed."

"And then, guess what? Two days later we would learn some new information and then we'd go back and change it again."

Working parents were also caught by closures of daycares and schools or some employees feared bringing COVID home to elderly parents or immunocompromised family members.

"For all those reasons, in the spring, we lost 25 per cent of our workforce," said Hyslop.

Risk feels real

Tensions began rising again in the past few months, as the number of COVID infections in the province started to climb.

Hyslop saidit has made the risk feel more real.

"Everybody now knows somebody who is being tested. Everybody knows somebody who is self-isolating. It's like, wow, it's getting close," he said.

"I talked to somebody this morning about his business. He has six employees who tested for COVID. That person had never had any employees tested for COVID so that's a whole different kind of anxiety and stress."

And it doesn't help when customers vent their frustrations on the people who are serving them.

"This is not the majority of people but it does make things that much worse."

"I was talking to somebody this morning. They were talking about being yelled at, half a dozen times a day because they don't have inventory, something they can't control," he said.

"We get that, too, from our customers who write nasty letters or yell at our staff because the product isn't there. They'll say that the last three times [they've been in the store] they can't find this or that. They really don't understand the consequences of people being home."

Three paid mental health days

Hyslop saidthere are times when there's nothing else to do but surrender to the situation, even when it's costing money.

"If someone needs to go home halfway through their day, you just have to walk up to them and tap them on the shoulder and say, 'You know, just go home. Take tomorrow off. Come back the next day,'" said Hyslop. "We're still doing that."

This year, the company has offered its workforce three paid mental health days for employees to use at their own discretion.

Hyslop said the company is also doubling down on practicing some of its core values, including compassion, communication and flexibility.

As a member of the New Brunswick business council, and an alumnusof the Wallace McCain Institute, which helps entrepreneurs get started in business, Hyslop saidhe's also trying to encourage other entrepreneurs to provide each other with peer support.

"They're having to deal with more mental health issues in the workplace than they've ever had to deal with before and being an entrepreneur doesn't necessarily give you the skills for that," he said.

"Hopefully, if people understand that they're not alone and that these are normal fears and anxieties, then they're less likely to do things that could have a negative impact on their own lives and the lives of others."

Emotional responses may be perfectly normal

In October, Hyslop invited Senator Stan Kutcher,professor emeritus of psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, to give a virtual fireside chat to alumni of the Wallace McCain Institute.

Kutcher saidone of his messages to the group was that negative emotional responses to a threat as serious as COVID may be perfectly normal.

"Not to feel worried or concerned, not to be upset, not to have to adapt to the challenges of COVID, that's completely unrealistic," he said.

"Of course,we can have negative emotional responses to the challenges of life. Their purpose is to alert us that we have a problem that we need to deal with."

Kutcher saidthe stresses of working through COVID will be more profound for "marginalized people, racialized people, people who don't have the luxuryof working from home, people who have to be on the front line, people whose ability to shieldthemselves from the reality of the threat of the illness isn't good."

He said employers owe their workers a duty to support them and make accommodations that are reasonable and they should include staff when it comes to re-thinking the workplace.

"Instead of having a top down, paternalistic model, we're going to include everybody in this discussion," he said. "We're going to use the wisdom of the group to help us design how we're going to move forward.

"But workplaces do not have an infinite capacity for changing themselves. It's also the responsibility of the employee to change. It has to be a dynamic that's back and forth."