by Kari Hensien | Mar 16, 2021 | Food Safety, food safety culture, Self-Assessments
Food safety always been critical to the success of restaurants. In addition to protecting customer and employee health, good food safety practices are the foundation of your brand reputation. Maintaining a good behavior-based food safety culture is more important than ever as we work to help the restaurant industry recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, making food safety an integral part of company culture can feel daunting. For many employees, this is just another box to check as they go about their day. They learn about cross contamination, proper hot and cold storage, and thorough cooking, but without a strong connection to the consequences and real buy-in from employees, you won’t reach a level where food safety is deeply embedded in company culture.
So how do you reach that point? It’s not as hard as it seems.
1. Talk More about Food Safety
For many restaurants, the conversation around food safety starts and ends with employees obtaining their food handlers permits. You cannot expect employees to care about food safety if it’s not a regular part of the conversation.
Add more food safety information to your training, and make your training is more than a one-time event. Employees need regular reminders about best practices to help combat sloppy habits that can form over time. You don’t need to spend hours at a time, even a small update monthly or quarterly lets employees know this is something they should care about and helps them remember proper food safety procedures.
Use concrete examples of the risks that come with poor food safety practices. Don’t just say that a certain behavior can allow bacteria to grow, talk about how that can sicken customers, lead to restaurant closures, and do long-term damage to the trust customers have in your business. Making consequences more concrete reinforces why these conversations need to happen.
2. Make Food Safety a Collaborative Concept
Most of us have had the experience of a new rule or process being dictated by a corporate office. There was likely an important reason for that rule, but without giving you and your fellow employees buy-in, the adoption was likely low or poorly implemented.
So you need to get employees involved in some way while still emphasizing the importance of specific steps that prevent foodborne illness. How? Regular self-assessments. Employees are so used to seeing audits as the one time a year where they get graded and given a list of areas of improvement that they may not realize audits can be a two-way street.
You can empower employees to become a team of chief quality officers by having them perform regular self-assessments. Not only will you get visibility into day-to-day operations, but they will also have an opportunity to provide feedback to you. When employees know their input is going somewhere and could make things different, you will begin to get the type of feedback that will improve overall food safety.
3. Show How It Makes a Difference
Integrate the data you collect into a quality management system that will help you analyze trends, identify potential trouble spots, and review compliance in specific locations. Then let employees know what you found.
Recognize and applaud improvements, and show areas that could use reinforcement. Employees are more willing to invest effort into the food safety culture when they get to see it is making a difference.
In a world where every customer is now a spot auditor watching for unsafe behaviors, it’s critical that you elevate your food safety culture above minimum requirements. We know it can seem intimidating to work on creating a behavior-based food safety culture at your company, but the steps to get started are within reach.
Want to get more information about how to implement and cultivate a food safety culture at your company? Check out our webinar with Food Safety Tech where Aden Donaldson, McDonald’s Restaurants Limited Quality Assurance Consultant, talks about how technology has helped drive a transformation in their food safety culture.
by Kari Hensien | Mar 9, 2021 | COVID-19, food safety culture, Quality Management System, RizePoint, Self-Assessments
Nearly a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it still feels a bit like we’re living in The Upside Down, to borrow a concept from Stranger Things. While we’ve all worked out some sort of new normal, many companies I talk to still see the changes prompted by the pandemic as temporary, waiting to revert to the way things were done.
You could go back to your previous status quo, but the risk is that rather than finding yourself where you were before, you’ll find instead that you have fallen behind. COVID-19 catalyzed changes in nearly every facet of business, and smart companies are using these changes to build momentum into something better. The pandemic exposed major gaps in traditional quality models, and your response will determine if you can build a modern quality management model to meet the needs of the future.
I see several ways COVID-19 is moving businesses toward the modernization of quality initiatives.
1. Every Employee Empowered to Make a Difference
In the absence of annual and third-party audits, many companies have increased self-assessments. This was initially seen as a stopgap measure to get some visibility until more traditional audits resumed, but I believe maintaining more frequent self-assessments adds a crucial employee perspective to your quality team.
It also empowers your employees in two key ways. First, when employees know and fulfill quality goals every day, you drive quality as a culture rather than a one-time test that must be passed. Second, by having employees give feedback with self-assessments, they know you see and value their input and will be more likely to give you an on-the-ground perspective you wouldn’t get any other way. Essentially, every employee becomes a proactive extension of your Chief Quality Officer.
2. Continuous Quality Management Driving a Proactive Response
Proactive response has been a catchphrase in quality management for years, but it wasn’t until the pandemic prompted a new way of thinking that more brands began looking for ways to make proactivity a reality.
The most effective way to do this is to begin building your continuous quality management system. Diversify your sources of data, combining things like self-assessments, annual audits, IoT devices, online review sites, customer experience surveys, and employee reviews. All of these will give you a fuller picture of your business and help you spot potential trouble areas so they can be addressed before any safety or quality issues become a problem.
3. Streamlined Tech Augmenting Team Capabilities
With budgets on hold because of COVID-19, many of the people I talk to have been looking for ways to get more out of tech they already have, either adding capabilities to augment their team or consolidate multiple systems.
This does not mean you need to break what already works, but rather supplement what you do well. For example, spreadsheets have long been a mainstay of assessments and audits. If you find those are working well for data collection, but you then don’t have a way to analyze the amount of data, it may be time to look at your tech stack. A good quality management system will only strengthen what your team can do. In this case, upload spreadsheets into the QMS and let the reporting capabilities help you analyze data, so you can identify hotspots and find actionable insights.
4. Safety & Traceability Driving Tech Adoption with Government and Partners
It’s not just brands who are becoming more tech driven. Certification bodies, government agencies, and suppliers are all adopting tech as a way of increasing safety and traceability. The FDA has launched the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, GLOBALG.A.P. implemented their Audit Online Hub, and supplies are working to monitor facilities more closely than ever before.
If you want to drive a food safety culture at your company, you need to be aligned with the initiatives driving food safety from the FDA. It’s time to embrace the technology that will help you track and mitigate outbreaks of foodborne illness or other food safety issues.
The pandemic has required companies to be nimble and responsive to new challenges. In many companies, this has helped drive change that would have taken years to arrive. However, the companies responding best to the crisis realize these do not have to be temporary changes. They can use the coronavirus as a wake-up call to make lasting improvements to their quality model.
Empower employees, embrace the ways technology can boost what works, and focus on continuous improvement. You don’t have to give up things the work well for employees (like spreadsheets!) to build a modern quality management team and culture.
As president of RizePoint, Kari Hensien will never stop using spreadsheets. However, as a champion of continuous quality and modernizing quality programs, she is always thrilled to help people keep their brand promises more efficiently in a way that is comfortable for quality managers. You can contact her at kari.hensien@rizepoint.com.
by Kari Hensien | Feb 2, 2021 | Document Management, food safety culture, Quality Management System, RizePoint, Self-Assessments, Supplier Quality Management
The world for quality management is changing dramatically. Supply chains are more complex, poor customer experiences can go viral in minutes, and COVID-19 has created a number of new potential risks and liabilities.
However, while the pandemic has surfaced new concerns, it did not cause these challenges for quality teams. Instead, they are the result of decades of technological innovation, evolving workplaces, and updated regulations.
Fortunately, these challenges are solvable. You can elevate quality and safety protocols with a few adjustments to the way you work, and to the tools that help you manage it all.
1. Make self-assessments a regular part of your quality data gathering.
Many businesses see self-assessments as something akin to an open-book test. Not technically cheating, but not as good as a test that required hours of study. We want to reframe that perception.
Increasing the frequency of self-assessments is a critical part of obtaining full visibility into your quality and safety goals. Self-assessments are not better or worse than annual or third-party assessments, simply different. They play a unique role in the quality ecosystem by helping you gather daily insights into every location.
Frequent self-assessments not only give you broader visibility, they also reinforce new or existing standards to employees. Empowering employees with knowledge and ownership of their work will help you build a continuous quality improvement model that pulls from multiple sources of data and pushes feedback directly to the places it will most make a difference.
2. Invest in software that enables data gathering and analysis.
Quality teams have struggled for years to find an effective way to compile and make sense of the data they gather. Spreadsheets have been a staple of the role since the dawn of Excel, but they don’t make it easy to collect and report on reams of data.
That is why you should look at a quality management system (QMS). A QMS makes it possible for you to keep what works for you and elevate what isn’t. If you love spreadsheets, but struggle with how disconnected they make your data, you can import the spreadsheets into a QMS and let it make the reports for you. If you want to collect more data but don’t have a way to correlate data from different sources, a QMS is built to help you do that.
If you’re ready to move into a modern quality model, you need something that will help you work better and the technology now exists to enable you.
3. Make food safety culture more than a buzzword.
It’s easy to say you want to change this or that about your culture, but it’s much harder to do so. Self-assessments will be part of helping you do that. Employees who see you care about and monitor food safety protocols are more likely to care as well.
You also need to take employee feedback seriously. Whether that comes in the form of a tipline, a self-assessment, or comments to managers, don’t brush off what employees have to say about food safety. They are the ones who see what the needs are every day. They may be able to point out improvements to the kitchen layout to reduce risk of cross contamination or tell you when a manager is ignoring proper hot and cold storage. It’s your job to listen and turn that feedback into a piece of your continuous safety and quality improvement system.
4. Make electronic updates the norm to improve consistency.
COVID-19 has exposed the weakness in antiquated paper communication with your employees. Too many companies are still using printouts that get missed by a third of employees or aren’t updated when policy changes.
You can distribute updated policies quickly and easily with digital systems. You can give employees accurate, timely updates in times of crisis or as needed, and know you have an effective communications system in place that you can rely on.
5. Modernize your vendor onboarding process.
Being able to quickly vet and onboard new vendors is a crucial to protecting your business during supply chain disruptions. During the pandemic, many companies have found themselves scrambling when key suppliers were out of critical items.
You can communicate with suppliers, avoid approval delays, and gather credentials with digital supplier management tools. All of this helps you ensure any new supplier meets your standards before becoming an approved vendor, and lets you act quickly when disruptions affect your business.
Adapting to the changing needs of quality management is a challenge, but solutions are available. You can start taking concrete steps to update how you collect, analyze, and communicate data. A quality management system will help you lay the foundation for a continuous quality management model, so you can keep what is tried and true for your team (like our beloved spreadsheets!) while getting help with the areas that give you trouble.
