Building a food safety quality culture is essential to ensure that your facility consistently produces clean, healthy food and meets the standards of any regulators who show up at the door. The most effective way of doing so is to involve more of your employees than you may think and to empower all of them with involvement in the shared goal of running a tight ship.
Here are three essential tips for getting everyone on board and enthusiastic about the project.
1. Train more.You should both do more training than the FDA requires and train more of your people than you think. In your food safety training, go beyond the FDA’s Preventive Controls for Human Foods course. Provide enhanced training, either on your own or through a provider like Biotrax. Also, go beyond providing training only to quality assurance managers. One of the fastest ways to build theculture is to train supervisors and assistant supervisors as well.
2. Offer the ‘why.’ Food safety maintenance won’t come naturally to your employees unless they understand why they need to do it. The most fundamental reason is to keep their jobs. Create a “we’re all in this together” culture by making it clear that the future of the company and everyone’s livelihoods are a risk if employees don’t participate. It’s also useful to talk about the moral obligation of making sure customers don’t get sick.
3. Give ownership .Enable your employees to have a say in the process. For example, if the employees in a given department request certain cleaning tools or an extra worker to help with food safety, provide them what they’ve requested or get as close to it as you can. You’ll help your employees feel ownership of the food safety efforts, and you’ll gain valuable information about what’s needed from those who are working with the equipment every day.
Expanding training and giving people ownership of the food safety plan are the essential elements in making sure your food safety culture grows and thrives. And a good food safety culture is the key to making sure your business can grow and thrive as well.
[DS1]FDA does not provide training. The FDA requires that employees be trained on the jobs they are responsible for and for GMPs involving their cleanliness and hygiene. This is a really non-starter of a paragraph, it doesn’t provide any real value statements.
[DS2]What is she trying to convey here? That the only reason to do your job is to keep your job?
[DS3]Another weird paragraph. This is written by someone who doesn’t understand the business…