 How tech can take safety, quality and compliance concerns off your plate
If you’re managing a continuous cycle of having to do more with less – like juggling more work across a smaller crew, for example, or having to conduct more onboarding training with fewer longtime staff on your roster – it can be easy for your food safety and quality to slip through the cracks. Fortunately, tech tools can help you ensure you’re upholding key standards regardless of what’s happening and which employees are staffed during a shift. As Restaurant Technology News reported recently, tech-driven support can include everything from prompts to wash hands during busy periods to reminders about completing compliance tasks across multiple locations. Looking at your operation, where are manual processes still in use? Where do you see your standards slipping – or see potential for that to happen? Looking externally, do all of your suppliers share your commitment to safety and have mechanisms in place to protect it, or is there room to make changes for the better? When automated tools are in place, you’re able to manage business more effectively with fewer people and you also stand to make your employees’ jobs a little easier, which can help with morale and retention.  Across your restaurant and any additional locations you operate, do you have standard record-keeping systems, training processes, operating procedures and compliance tasks that apply across the board? Identifying any areas of your restaurant that are out of sync with other parts of your operation can go far in helping your business. You will be able to better identify patterns in your food safety and pinpoint varying interpretations of procedures that may generate problems. Your staff will learn the same skills in the same way. This helps you provide a consistent experience for your guests, as well as ensure that your staff from one location can easily slip into roles in a different location when labor needs or development opportunities arise. Finally, you demonstrate to regulators that you run a business that is committed to doing the right thing — as a result, you’ll be in a good position to work in partnership with them to build upon your strengths.
 Even if your business has a strong food safety record and culture, the rapid turnover of a workforce can chip away at it if you don’t take action to protect it. A report from Food Safety Magazine encourages businesses to rise to the challenge in four steps using the acronym SAVE: Standardize your processes across your locations and production zones. Automate processes where possible in an effort to simplify your training and compliance procedures. Validate the effectiveness of hygiene protocols and compliance using tools that can keep you on track. Finally, educate people across your organization about the “why” of food safety – it helps people retain both the training material and your expectations of them when it comes to protecting the business.
 Does your restaurant’s food safety culture run deep – or could it easily become watered down with the departure of certain staff who reinforce it? If you can bring greater standardization to your food safety processes, both within a facility and across your locations if you operate more than one, this will go a long way in helping you ensure the consistency you need to weave food safety into the fabric of your business. Consider all of your food safety processes. Are any of them unnecessarily complex – or applied slightly differently in one location than another? How can you make each process simpler, easier to follow, and applied in a standard way across your organization?
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