A positive food safety culture is a key component of ensuring the production of safe products and minimising the risk of product contamination and recall, which can lead to significant costs as well as a damaged reputation.
Everyone in the business has a part to play in a positive food safety culture, from senior management to shop floor staff.
How can you develop a positive food safety culture?
Step 1 – Engage with your employees
Businesses must gather their employees’ opinions to find out what it’s really like to work at your company. This will enable you to focus on any areas which you need to improve.
To do this, senior management need to think about how they can get employees to give them honest and genuine feedback about key areas in the business such as communication, training and innovation. Tools such as questionnaires and focus groups may be useful to gather this information.
Step 2 – Review the data
Once you’ve gathered feedback from your staff, you need to determine what the data means and ensure you have considered the views and opinions of everyone in the business.
From the employee feedback you should identify the positives, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement and determine which areas you want to develop further.
Step 3 – Create a Food Safety Culture Action Plan
Create some Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-related objectives to improve your food safety culture. Remember, it’s better to do a few things really well, than lots of things badly.
What does a useful and successful ‘Action Plan’ look like? Here are a few factors to consider:
How do you drive positive change in food safety culture?
The challenge for any business is driving the actions forward to achieve meaningful change.
Consider the following tools to achieve meaningful and effective change to your company’s food safety culture:
Step 4 – Measuring change
Businesses must think about how they can measure changes in their food safety culture. This can be challenging as sometimes it can be as simple as a shift in opinion or feeling towards something.
However, change can be measured using methods such as culture and job satisfaction surveys and pulse checks.
Step 5 – Review
Businesses need to review their Food Safety Culture Action Plan to monitor progress and evaluate change. Don’t expect a change in culture to happen overnight – in fact, it’s far better to ensure time is allowed for each action to be understood and implemented and to make sure that employees are engaged with the change rather than trying to measure an impact too early.
Summary
Food Safety Culture improvement is a continuous cycle. Once you have reviewed and reflected upon any changes in food safety culture, you should modify your action plan accordingly to drive continuous improvements.
Do you need support with developing a positive food safety culture in your business?
If so,
get in touch with ZERO2FIVE and find out more about the support we can offer.
