COVID-19 Related Mental Health Effects in the Workplace: A Case of Fast-food Industry in Malaysia

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the fast-food industry adversely. Consequently, the employee's responsibility is expanding, they are stressed over their well-being also in light of the fact that they are in touch with individuals consistently. This might increase the stress and tension alongside contributing to mental health issues among the employees. However, little attention has been paid to this issue in Malaysia towards a deep understanding of the influential factors. Thus, the goal of this study is to identify the influential factors and the most consequential factor that cause mental health issues among fast food employees in the workplace during pandemics as well as to examine the relationship between the influence factors and fast-food employees' mental health. Quantitative research data has been gathered among 161 fast food workers in Malaysia to determine the workload, job satisfaction, work environment, and salary to deal with employees' mental health. The convenience sampling method was used to select fast food restaurants for the study. Besides, personal contact was used to approach the fast-food workers, who were then snowballed into participating. The data was collected by using a self-administered questionnaire through google form. Then, the data was analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26. Multiple regression was conducted to identify employees’ mental health using the aforementioned four variables, and the findings revealed that 52% of the variance in employees’ mental health was explained by workload, job satisfaction, work environment, and salary. In addition, the findings gathered from this study indicated a favorable correlation between employees' mental health and both workload and work environment. Meanwhile, researchers found that employees' mental health was weakly positively correlated with both their job satisfaction and their salary. This research attempts to encourage managers in focusing on these four criteria in order to improve employee well-being.