by Kari Hensien | Mar 1, 2016 | Corrective Action Plans, RizePoint
Like most professionals, I like to stay informed about what is happening in my field, which for me includes food service, retail, and hospitality industries. It amazes me when I read stories of companies failing inspections, or worse, being responsible for a foodborne illness incident that negatively impacts their brand. What is even more interesting is the minimal number of times that leadership publicly responds to inspection failures or instances.
It’s Not the Time to Look for Excuses
In a recent case involving a food producer, OSHA inspectors found several violations in their production facility, and in a second follow-up visit, OSHA found additional violations. In this particular case, the organization accepted $100,000 in penalties, signed the enhanced safety compliance agreement, and took full responsibility for the issues. Unfortunately, leadership assuming full responsibility for violations is not as common as one would think. In fact, they often deflect to other leaders in their organization or make excuses to avoid acknowledging that they weren’t in compliance.
Another example is of a recent string of restaurant incidents in Miami that its management made the decision to shut their restaurants down to take corrective action. Management, in this particular case, took responsibility without giving excuses. They stated, “We have rigorous health and safety policies and procedures in place that were not adhered to. There is no excuse for this, and we have retrained our management and staff to ensure this doesn’t happen again.” Although this organization’s management stated they have “policies and procedures in place,” one would have to wonder what, if any, control mechanism they have in place to prevent these incidents from happening again.
Responsible Corrections
When significant issues or a non-compliant incident occurs within your organization, your team and the public will look at how you respond. If they see you taking full responsibility and providing an action plan to prevent future violations, the public will continue to support you. Taking responsibility is only one action needed in tough times, having full visibility of the situation and the appropriate data to put corrective measures in place is equally critical.
Understanding the “How?” of any incident and possessing enough details to determine if the situation was isolated or an ongoing problem will help you mitigate the impact of the situation and quickly restore your reputation and protect your brand. Whether you have multiple OSHA violations, are the cause of a foodborne illness event, or worse, it’s vital to engage as a trusted leader and ensure you have all of the information needed for an appropriate response strategy.
Below are a few key items to consider when incidents do happen:
- Complete visibility: While there is a critical balance between being 100% transparent and ensuring the protection of your brand, being open about what happened, and presenting factual data about the incident, is necessary. Shareholders, customers, and employees will react accordingly to how you respond and your level of openness about what happened.
- Be like Sherlock: Don’t make assumptions, make sure you gather as many data points as possible, and be prepared for your responses. You should have processes, standards, and systems in place before an incident happens, and be ready to modify them if something does. Seek out the experts to get their insight. Their expertise is critical to knowing how you should respond to the incident and what strategies are implemented to correct the problems.
- Internal importance: Keeping your internal team updated about how you plan to respond to incidents is just as important as how you respond publicly. Your team will continue to look for your leadership and guidance. Regular updates keep everyone in sync, preventing rumors and other information from leaking out.
- No finger pointing: Although one would assume that this is a given, the reality is it continues to happen. Pointing fingers and blame only aggravates the situation and can diminish your credibility as a leader both internally and externally.
- Having a breadcrumb trail: My philosophy tends to lean heavily on preventing situations from happening, but you cannot avoid all incidents. I firmly advocate having systems in place to track the actions you took before events occur, during and after. This breadcrumb trail gives you an advantage in being at the top of your game before and if an incident or violation occurs.
Putting Everything on the Line and Online
How does a brand build confidence with their customers? By putting everything out and in the public and online. A famous Columbus, Ohio burger chain did exactly that by publishing its health inspection scores online. To quote one of the Vice Presidents of the burger chain, “This information we have, information our customers are interested in, why not make it easier for them to explore it”. This approach is bold and we applaud the organization for being pioneers in transparency. Why shouldn’t customers have easy access to health and safety information about the places they eat or about the places they stay?
No one wants to be responsible for safety or quality infractions, but if it happens, you’ll want to be confident that your teams are ready for action and that your reputation will be protected with RizePoint compliance management software. No more excuses!
by Di Lewis | Feb 11, 2016 | Business Intelligence, RizePoint
Today’s evolving world demands a lot from businesses. While you’re doing all you can to keep up with the fast pace of the
outside world and your growing industry and meet customer demands, your business is also required to maintain compliance with all your industry’s regulations. Compliance software is an efficient way to stay on top of all your compliance needs and satisfy your customer demands.
But, some companies don’t think they really need to implement compliance software. If this is your current mentality or if you’re on the fence, here are 10 signs to convince you that your business needs compliance software.
1. Customer satisfaction is low.
No matter your market, today’s business landscape is a consumer-centric one. So if your customer satisfaction is low, it’s time to take action to drive your customer satisfaction rating up. You not only need to be compliant in the sense of safety and legal reasons, but to please your customers and drive revenue.
When you don’t provide customers with pleasant experiences, you’re going to lose those customers and potential ones because of others’ bad experiences. Whether it’s a lack of effective communication about compliance standards and operating procedures, inability to maintain compliance consistencies across locations or not being able to regularly monitor what’s working and what’s not in terms of compliance, the right compliance software positively impacts your company’s overall performance and compliance, which in turn improves your customer satisfaction.
2. Customer numbers are dropping.
Many of today’s customers won’t do, or continuing doing, business with a company unless they have a compliance program in place.
A lot of emphasis is placed on better business practices. Implementing a compliance management system could be what allows you to get a new customer and turn them into a loyal customer. You need a compliance program to make sure your company doesn’t violate your customer program, and automated compliance software is an affordable way to implement your compliance management system.
3. Safety breaches have occurred.
Have you ever had a breach in food safety? Or failed a health inspection? If you answered yes to either of these, then you desperately need a food safety and quality management system.
This system makes sure your business complies with each food and safety regulation, during each step of the process. It saves time when it comes to tracking your processes and products, and allows you to aggregate all your data and create clear, effective safety audit forms.
4. You’ve paid thousands of dollars in penalties.
Non-compliance leads to monetary consequences and damages with your brand’s reputation. It could cost you thousands of dollars in fines and other repairs if you’re caught being non-compliant.
Compliance software is the solution you need if you’ve found yourself on the wrong side of the law one too many times. It ensures you stay on top of your operating procedures and every compliance detail, to keep your staff and customers healthy and safe, and keep your business away from unwanted monetary penalties.
5. Current process is time-consuming and costly.
Maintaining compliance is a complex, costly and time-consuming ongoing process. But with compliance management software, it’s not.
Software boosts your overall process. It reduces the time it takes your business to get and stay compliant, resulting in less money and other resources spent working on compliance procedures. It provides a more efficient way to track your compliance of quality and safety inspections, know what actionable steps to take to improve your operating procedures and improve communication amongst employees, all of which saves you time and money by providing a more proficient way of handling compliance.
6. Things aren’t clear across the board.
Without transparency and visibility into company operations and open communication amongst departments and company locations about proper business standards, consistent compliance isn’t possible. Everyone needs to be aware of company operations and what compliance regulations are to be followed.
Compliance software keeps everyone up-to-date on all things compliance related. From your COO to your regional managers to your 9-5 employees to your stakeholders, effective communication is possible. Standards and other pertinent information are kept clear across the board with customizable emails, role-based notifications and real-time data. Compliance software seamlessly keeps everyone on the same page and on a unified compliance front.
7. Unaware of any compliance gaps.
No business or its employees are perfect. Mistakes are bound to happen, and even with every careful step you take, your business runs the risk of having gaps in compliance.
Compliance management software proactively works to safeguard your compliance. You need to act fast in order to correct compliance issues before they become expensive liabilities. This kind of software system immediately notifies you when a compliance gap is found and then creates a real-time action plan, providing a plan fit for your company so you take the right measures to fix the problem.
8. Productivity is down.
How productive your employees are is in direct correlation with how profitable your business is. If your employees are wasting half of their workdays dealing with manual compliance processes and sifting through trivial emails and data, office productivity is sure to be down.
Compliance management software was designed to boost employee productivity. It streamlines company processes and employee tasks. When employees are properly trained on how to use the system and understand all the benefits of using it, your productivity and profit will rise.
9. Your policy management is disorganized.
Who has time to keep track of hundreds of paper files of various policies? No one. You don’t have the time or the space either. But, policies are still important, and managing them in an organized manner is something you have to do.
Software makes it easier to keep track of every policy and stay organized doing so. Some even let you manage a policy through its entire lifecycle. You can create and submit policies for editing or approval, and then once approved send them out to the applicable employees all from within the software.
10. You have a compliance audit coming up.
You want to pass your compliance audit, not fail it. And you don’t want to make the process harder than necessary for the auditor coming to perform your company’s audit.
Automated compliance software ensures better audit management. Your business and industry are constantly changing, and an automated platform allows you to quickly make changes and keep your audit forms up-to-date in real-time. It also means increased auditor consistency and guarantees each of your business locations receive a quality evaluation.
Convinced you need compliance software yet? Because as we’ve shown, only good things can come when your business implements this software.
by Whitney McCarthy | Feb 8, 2016 | Hospitality, RizePoint
As millennials take over 75% of the workforce by 2025, they will also represent 50% of all travelers that visit hotel properties by the same year. Millennials are tech savvy and expect a high-tech experience when staying at your hotel. They are socially connected unlike any other generation and will be the first to tell the world about how bad or how great an experience they had while staying at a property.
Over half of Millennials stayed at independent hotels last year, 20% more than baby boomers, and they are expecting a different experience from booking to checkout. I remember a time when I had a negative hotel experience and my frustration grew beyond my return home. Like many before me, I wrote a strongly worded letter and mailed it to the hotel’s manager. Thankfully, technology has changed how we share experiences, and with review platforms readily available, and instantaneous, we can post our experience on TripAdvisor, Yelp, and many other travel sites. Additionally, with new competition coming into the market like AirBnB, VRBO, and other potential market entrants into the hospitality market, it is more important now than ever to ensure your properties meet both your branding standards and industry regulations to prevent one of those negative reviews. Reviews are not only weighed heavily to attract Millennial travelers, but also to keep them coming back.
Below are three areas where Millennials will have high expectations from your properties:
1. Critical Consistency
How many of your properties across the country or globe have their customer service presence on social media? How many are actively monitoring these social channels to respond immediately to negative reviews and comments? Have you implemented standard quality standards across your properties when it comes to social customer service? What does on-property customer service involve? Is the experience the same from one property to the next? Millennials expect consistency, and it is critical that you have a way to ensure that your customer service procedures are consistent from one property to the next.
2. What’s a Key?
Millennials were practically born with technology in their hand upon birth. There isn’t a time when they can’t remember the Internet or mobile phones. As Smartphones have become a commodity with this generation, they will change the way that you look at your hotel property. Access to technology like free WiFi and charging stations are important to consider because their vision is to order room service online using their phone without dialing room service, check-out from their phone, and immediately share reviews for every service. Additionally, a starting trend will have them expecting to be able to check-in on their mobile phone, and even walk to their room and open the door with their phone.
3. We’re Expecting!
From our experience, most properties have some form of brand standards, and most properties are checked to ensure compliance. Millennials will push your branding standards even further for many reasons. For example, if they visit one property and experience a comfortable bed, pleasant customer service, and enjoy a great night’s rest, they’ll expect to have that same experience the next time they stay at another of your properties. However, if the next time they stay in a comparable property and the bed is uncomfortable, the room is not as clean, or customer service is poor, your reputation can be compromised. Almost instantaneously, guests can post negative reviews, social media updates, and share photos describing the negative experience.
Influential Tracking
One main takeaway from these three items is that you need consistent processes and oversight to ensure that your properties are in line with your brand, technology, safety, and customer service standards. Millennials are shifting which services you deliver and how you deliver them. One example is how one hotel chain has removed many of its in-room desks, a new branding standard to please Millennials. Will it work? Only time will tell.
Without a centralized auditing program to keep track of these standards and a simple method of inspecting and auditing those standards, you will find that the constant change this generation expects will put your reviews at risk, which will negatively impact your bottom line.
by Kari Hensien | Jan 26, 2016 | Food Safety, FSMA, RizePoint
As John Knotwell described in his recent blog, “In Food We Trust,” food safety is critical for the sustainability of any food service organization. What I find interesting is that when asked the question, “Whose responsibility is food safety as it relates to contaminated food?” the answers vary depending on who is asked: growers, food service companies, or suppliers.
Whether the contamination was product-driven or behavior-driven, it is ultimately the responsibility of the restaurant to ensure that all food products are 100% safe. When this responsibility is compromised, legal implications quickly follow — and not just out-of-court settlements, but also the possibility of federal law violations. Whose reputation is hurt the most? Historically, it is where the food was consumed. However, stricter regulations backed by increased funding may help the increasing food safety saga.
FSMA and Self-Regulation
The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was signed into law on January 4, 2011. In November 2015, the FDA released additional regulations for farmers and food importers to prevent food safety problems. These added requirements are expected to reduce foodborne illness, rebuilding trust in the food supply and increasing trust in chains serving food products. It doesn’t mean, however, that food retailers should sit back and let the suppliers take on all the burden.
The FSMA provides strong incentives for self-regulation. If you consider the potential sales declines and dramatic loss of consumer confidence in your brand, the financial incentives to protect your markets and reputation are just as important as protecting public health. Unfortunately, many organizations implement changes after a situation happens, or when regulators put new laws into place like the FSMA.
FSMA Title 2 requires all facilities — including those that transport, hold or receive food — to keep records of internal audits, food safety plans, and recalls. The FDA must have access to these on-demand. This regulatory accountability makes it vital for food service enterprises to systematically track and report on internal audits and inspections.
One recent example is in the case of the restaurant chain that experienced both E.coli and NoroVirus outbreaks. After the devastating outcome that continues many months later, they have decided to go to a central supplier (versus a distributed supply chain) to reduce their risk. Of course, the organization recognizes the importance of customer safety, but they are now intensely reacting, trying to regain broken trust. Like others before them, they realize that having a centralized point of internal audit documentation — from supplier through preparation and point of sale — is critical.
Strengthen the trust between your brand and the consumer
We have all learned that life can be altered in an instant, and the food safety arena is no different. Your company may be enjoying growth and revenue success, but it can just as quickly become negative. In my previous article titled Food Safety: Are You in Control?, I spoke about how adverse publicity can have an impact on shareholder value and with your customers. Although the FSMA is designed to increase food safety across the supply chain, the ultimate responsibility lies with you and your team. Your goal of providing a safe food product and quality of service is critical. You must have a “unified source of truth” where you can identify issues, manage corrective actions, enhance business processes and assure compliance. By closing the gap in food safety compliance, you will live up to your brand promise and increase guest satisfaction. To learn more, visit https://5898d85001.nxcli.net/solutions/foodservice/.
About the Author
Frank Maylett is President and CEO at Steton. he brings more than 20 years of experience leading, selling and expanding software service organizations. Prior to Steton he was Executive Vice President for Global Sales, Services and Alliances at Workfront/AtTask Inc. In that role he dramatically grew SaaS revenue and increased productivity, positioning Workfront as the leader in Enterprise Work Management. Frank has also worked for inContact, Kabira Technologies, IBM and Novell. Frank is a 2014 recipient of Selling Power Magazine 50 Best Companies in America to Sell For award, ranking at number 20, and the 2013 recipient of Utah Business Magazine Sales and Marketing Executive of the Year (SAMY Award) for excellence in sales leadership.
by Michelle Bailey | Jan 12, 2016 | Food Safety, RizePoint
Whether we walk into a five-star, buffet style, or fast food restaurant, we have an expectation that what we consume is nourishing us, not something that is sending us to a hospital. With more cases of foodborne illnesses popping up almost weekly, the Agriculture Appropriations Committee felt that the FDA needed an increase in spending to improve food safety.
In early 2016, we saw the House of Representatives release a $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government through the end of the 2016 fiscal year. Included in this bill was a $104.5-million-dollar increase in food safety activities, which is part of the $2.72 billion in the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) discretionary funding.
The Ongoing Foodborne Saga
Foodborne illness is common and costly yet a very preventable public health problem. The CDC reports that reducing foodborne illness by 10% would keep five million Americans from getting sick each year. Here are just a few examples of some of these outbreaks.
- As of November 19, 2015, more than 45 people in six states had been infected with the outbreak strain of STEC 026, and much of that linked to a recent E. coli outbreak at a well-known chain restaurant.
- In late 2015, the CDC reported a multi-state outbreak of Shiga-toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157: H7 infectionslinked to chicken salad from a well-known big box store chain.
- In early 2015, a leading ice cream producer reported listeria in their ice cream, which resulted in a massive recall that brought unwanted attention to the century-old Texas ice cream Like many organizations that have faced similar situations, they hired a team of microbiologists, cleaned and sanitized their systems, increased employee training, and plan to test all product before shipment to food retailers. Also like so many companies before them, this ice cream producer — for the first time in 108 years — had to make the difficult decision to lay off 37% of their workforce due to this single situation involving a foodborne illness.
The Ongoing Solution
Food safety responsibility is critical to all aspects of the food value chain — from the growers, distributors, and suppliers to retailers, restaurants, and other institutions serving food products. But often the heaviest impact of a recall or outbreak is not at the food supplier or grower but at the point of purchase.
“Reducing foodborne illness by 10% would keep five million Americans from getting sick each year.” – Center for Disease Control
Proactive vendors operate from a strategic compliance model, including strict policies and processes for regular food safety audits and supply chain inspections. These organizations are more likely to mitigate exposure while at the same time protecting their brand and profitability. Going digital and using the type of tools that RizePoint provides can help you track and manage hundreds of suppliers, making sure you and your suppliers are always striving for best practice in food safety.
Preserving customer trust is much better than trying to regain it.
by Kari Hensien | Dec 22, 2015 | Food Safety, RizePoint
If there is one thing that shareholders hate more than bad publicity, it’s a bad quarterly statement. In the recent case of a national restaurant brand, we saw more than one hundred people infected with a pathogenic strain of E. Coli. As business leaders, we are obligated to address such critical issues before they impact our corporate brands and ultimately shareholder value. It is much more complicated to fix problems once they happen than it is to invest in making sure they don’t happen.
Negative Publicity and Dropping Stock Price
In this particular case, the national chain has seen a 30% decline in stock price in just two months.
Adverse publicity and the risk of a bad quarterly statement is clear and present for this national chain in question. When negative publicly surrounding situations such as an E. Coli outbreak, it usually results in a domino effect. Customers will abandon your restaurants, some shareholders will sell off their stock immediately, and others will hold and see how the executive team handles the situation. In this particular case, the national chain has seen a 30% decline in stock price in just two months. While I’m sure this brand can recover, they will not do so without a black eye for the brand and a considerable lower shareholder value.
Potential investors look for companies that have strong brands and where their stock shows promise. With people in nine states contracting E. coli after eating at this chain, and another 140 in Boston, mostly college students, contracting a different disease — norovirus — after eating at the same chain. It isn’t just one bad press story that will hurt your stock price and sales, it’s when companies have multiple situations of food safety over a short period. All of this is preventable and even in the situations where it may not have been preventable, having the proper audit trail and supplier list allows your team to respond quickly and remove the contaminated product from your stores before it becomes a larger problem.
Increase Value to Both Customers and Shareholders
When a situation like an E. coli breakout happens, many organizations will just put a Band-Aid on their issues versus implementing fundamental changes to their standards and processes. Organizations have to look at efficient methods of rebuilding their food safety standards and protocols, not just to throw people at them. If your existing processes are manual with little accountability and reporting, adding more steps to an already complex process will not reduce the risk of future incidents.
Responsibility for good health and safety practices begins with the leadership team and proceeds throughout every level of management and staff. Having the right tools to support your management team and staff is equally critical to the success of your overall program. The goal of your program should always be to prevent foodborne illness or injury. However, you cannot overlook the executive-level goals of maintaining a strong corporate brand as well as ensuring that shareholder value remains stable. The only way that this can be accomplished is having the right level of reporting from the bottom up, and it has to readily available.
Incidents go beyond impacting customer safety; the domino effect will impact suppliers, employees, sales, profits, stock price and eventually shareholder value. As leaders, we have the ultimate responsibility to protect every aspect of our businesses and continued work to find ways to improve and provide better visibility across the entire organization.
Reducing Risk of Audit Flaws
In many situations where there has been negative food or other health safety conditions, the FDA had found that auditors reported the food operations had high conformance rates (95+%) with standards in the Superior levels. Let’s look at that sentence again, a company had a foodborne illness outbreak, yet their last audit indicated they had a high conformance rate, and the auditor gave the restaurant a Superior quality level. Many existing audit methods and reporting tools lean heavily on the manual side, which increases the risk of error. Humans make mistakes during the audit process; they are human after all. Furthermore, mistakes are made during the analysis process as many of the tools and applications being used by auditors are also error-prone and time-consuming. Having the best people and systems in place to prevent such incidents is important. Reducing the risk of incidents starts with having the proper standards and guidelines in place and the ability to compare the results of your inspections and audits against your standards quickly and accurately.
Executive teams should have access to audit and inspection results at their fingertips and sufficient reporting in place that they are able to quickly look up items, such as the top 10 issues the company has had across every single restaurant location in the last six months. Having this type of “snapshot” data at your fingertips quickly allows you and your teams to respond to known issues and prevent future issues from surfacing.
Consistency is Valuable to Shareholder Value
Consistency is king in the food service industry, as well as food hygiene and safety. A few years back in 2013, TGI Friday’s reported that it received a five out of five in the United Kingdom for having the highest food safety rating of all of its 60 stores. According to their management team, the company invested a seven-figure sum to achieve the five-star rating.
When shareholders hear news like this and the fact that the company invested more than a million dollars in ensuring that it met the government’s food safety standards, this is money to their ears. Like customers, shareholders love consistency in standards, processes and revenue growth. The first two certainly have an impact on the third. Tracking quality and safety with your suppliers, distributors, processing, food preparation – all the way through to the customer’s table – helps keep business on target and also assigns proper accountability.
Properly managing food safety auditing and inspections should be considered equally important to your business as your product quality and delivery are. It’s time for you to rethink your quality assurance processes, and evaluate tools that ensure those processes are error-free. RizePoint Enterprise Compliance Management software is purpose-built to proactively safeguard both food service compliance performance as well as shareholders. Learn more at RizePoint.com
