Making your food safety training sink in with your employees is as much about the “how” of your lessons as their “what.” In other words, your staff is more apt to engage with your training and remember it if you focus on the people impacted by the lessons you’re teaching – not just the nuts and bolts of safe food handling. Use case studies to reinforce the messages you’re trying to deliver. The Stop Foodborne Illness Toolkit provides a case study of a baby who contracted Salmonella, along with some discussion guides aimed at various parts of a foodservice organization. It may help you see how different groups perceive their food safety roles differently and where you may have to fill gaps in training and knowledge. Restaurants that are less likely to experience foodborne illness outbreaks tend to have a couple of key traits in common, according to research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It may come as a surprise, but their study found that factors such as a restaurant’s food safety training, sick leave pay, and policies to keep sick workers from reporting to work are less connected to the frequency of outbreaks. However, restaurants with a certified kitchen manager on staff, and food safety certification training provided by a state agency, local agency, or restaurant corporation were less likely to experience outbreaks. As you work to improve your food safety record, consider how working with a certified third party could help reinforce what your staff needs to know – and also empower your kitchen managers to lead by example. Much as we may intend for the systems and training we have in place to keep business running smoothly, there are days when operating a restaurant can feel like playing a game of whack-a-mole. If you find yourself and your staff reacting to problems more often than proactively managing and mitigating them, take it as an alert that it’s time for a reset. Is there a pattern to the problems that continue to crop up? Do the seeming emergencies all require an urgent response from you? Can you scale back on meetings or automate back-office tasks that would allow you to spend more time supporting staff or guests? Instead of continuing to react to crises, step back and dig deeper into the root cause of the problems you’re experiencing. A recent Food Safety Magazine report encourages organizations to think of sanitation as resting on a three-legged stool. People, training programs, and hygienic design and maintenance represent the three legs – and when one or more legs is compromised, it brings down the others. If you have a safety failure, scrutinize each of these legs of the stool to find the root cause. Do you have sufficient people on hand to complete the tasks required? Do they understand what they need to accomplish and when? Is your equipment able to be cleaned easily and does your staff have the appropriate tools and cleaning materials they need? You may see patterns emerging that can help you zero in on your biggest risks. Consumers with food allergies are a growing – and potentially loyal – group of guests. But as a recent QSR Magazine report indicates, a large percentage of restaurant staff aren’t equipped to identify and serve allergens safely. As this study found, more than 70 percent of restaurant staff believe the food they serve is safe but less than half of these employees had received allergen-specific training. At a time when the FDA’s list of major allergens continues to expand with the addition of sesame this year, are your staff aware of new labeling requirements and how to handle allergens safely? We have all been on the receiving end of a person who overcommunicates – too many instructions and too many details can make a person tune out the extra information. But in the context of communicating with staff, tuning out key information can generate harmful risks. Are there any key messages that tend to get lost in a sea of instructions? Lean on your best frontline staff to boil down the most important information you need to communicate for a given task and account for employees’ need to absorb it in different formats. Some information is best learned when a person has to do a related task or teach it to others, while other procedures can be presented in quiz form for a team contest. It also helps to take the temperature of your team on a regular basis: Does everyone have a nonpunitive means of asking questions and accessing information when they need it? Frontline workers embody your restaurant’s food safety culture – but what they represent to the public isn’t always understood at the top of the business. A recent webinar from Food Safety Magazine indicated that senior leaders in an organization tend to rate their culture as 68 percent more mature than their frontline colleagues do. That’s even though frontline managers make up 60 percent of the workforce and manage 80 percent of it. To bridge the disconnect, experts on the webinar advised gentle nudges to steer frontline food safety in the right direction. These nudges could include physical markings on floors and walls, group handwashing stations that make activities like handwashing more social, daily routines in which staff must answer a food safety question or provide input and the supervisor responds with positive feedback or an action item they are taking as a result, social normative messages that provide feedback about the team’s overall knowledge about a particular area of food safety, or social recognition – like a time-off savings account that can be tapped by a team that wins a contest around food safety. Your restaurant has likely had to make big changes to adapt to new consumer habits in the past few years. If you’re juggling a new mix of order streams, you may also be adjusting to new traffic patterns, as well as to new food preparation and service areas required to support changes to your business. This can create opportunities for cross-contamination, as well as missed temperature checks or overall quality checks. Make sure your food and safety training accurately reflects your work flow and – if your technology isn’t already helping to direct traffic – that your team knows how to respond to (and ensure the safety and quality of) orders coming from multiple sources. Chances are you have people from a range of generations on your team – and the mix is always shifting. That has an impact on how your food safety training is received and how it must be delivered as a result. According to operators at the 16th annual Nation’s Restaurant News Food Safety Symposium, multigenerational teams often need varying instruction. For example, the fast-casual brand Noodles & Company employs workers across four generations – and the restaurant’s director of food safety and quality assurance says the brand’s younger workers respond best to 30-second instructional videos, while their older team members tend to respond best to written cards. If you’re getting mixed food safety results in your restaurant, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at your training and seeking feedback from staff about how they learn best – whether due to generational differences or simply preferences. You want to make sure your most important lessons are being delivered in ways that are most likely to be absorbed. Managers have to deliver negative feedback sometimes. Maybe there is a food safety task that is a repeat problem – or perhaps a team member has a hard time getting it right. Managers stand the best chance of having any negative feedback sink in and result in corrective action if they surround any negative feedback with a greater amount of positive recognition of what a person is doing well. Recognition is one of the seven food safety pillars that the food safety consultancy Steritech uses to evaluate a restaurant’s food safety management. Ironically, it tends to be a weak area for many businesses, even though it often provides the motivation needed for change to occur. You can build trust across your team by weaving thanks and recognition into the fabric of the training and support you provide. Thank people for keeping your business safe and encourage (and reward) your team members who recognize and reinforce it with their peers too. |
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