Encouraging Behavior Change among Foodservice Employees

A few months ago, we published a blog about the human factor and food safety. Within that blog, we discussed a bit about behavior change, including the subjective norm. You might recall the subjective norm refers to the culture that either supports food safety, or not.

In training employees and managers about food safety, besides the subjective norm, we need to talk about the attitudes and barriers to food safety implementation. In academe, we always like to think of things in silos, that they are not dependent upon one another, but in the real-world, we know this is simply not the case. For example, if you have a positive food safety culture, positive attitudes and removing barriers to positive food safety behaviors would logically follow. Absent of either one of those, a positive food safety culture is not likely to exist.

What is each member of your team’s true attitude about food safety? You know…the attitude they have when your ears are not listening, or you are not in the kitchen. Part of starting to change attitudes is the employee (or manager) having a solid understanding of the rationale behind our practices. For example, a few years ago we were working with a large school system and helping them to improve their foods safety program. One of the things a colleague and I observed while doing on-site inspections was the employees were nice enough to have filled out the cooler temperature log for us. But, not just for that hour, for the entire week, yet it was only 7:45 on a Tuesday morning. Those employees were either clairvoyant or they were dry logging, and certainly the former couldn’t be true. The truth is that those employees understood what they were asked to do, but really didn’t comprehend WHY they were doing it. Thinking about it, if you had never worked in a commercial kitchen before, when was the last time you recorded a refrigerator temperature at home? Taking it one step further, when was the last time you made someone ill because you didn’t have proper refrigerator temperatures at home? It is easy to surmise that the employees who did this are lazy and simply did not want to do it, but we generally find that there is more to the story than this and simply taking the time to help them realize why we do these tasks helps them connect the dots to improve their behavior.

What is each member of your team’s true attitude about food safety? You know…the attitude they have when your ears are not listening, or you are not in the kitchen.

Removing barriers is also important. It is important to note these can be actual barriers or perceived barriers. I once had an employee who told me it took too long to wash his hands. Thus, he could not do it, because we (referring to the managers) were so focused on ticket times and getting food out to the guests, he simply didn’t have time to wash he hands that much. There were at least two wrong things with that statement. First, it really doesn’t take too long to wash your hands. In reality, you can wash your hands 12 times in four minutes (we even made a poster in a previous study to explore the impacts it would have on behavior). The second was that we were conveying the wrong message to our employees (but that will be the focus of another blog). In this case, it was a perceived barrier that was stopping him from washing his hands. An actual barrier we once observed while doing on-site observations at a restaurant was the lack of thermometers. When we asked the manager about the notable absence of any thermometers in the kitchen, he exclaimed he was not going to buy any more this quarter, because the employees were stealing them. While we could discuss what was really happening with the thermometers (and I doubt the employees were stealing these highly coveted bimetallic stemmed thermometers), regardless of what was happening with them, we need to have them available for our employees if we ever want them to take a temperature.

Although my life as a researcher and teacher at a university looks much different than it did a few years ago when I was in the foodservice industry, I do still appreciate and understand the challenges that come with running a foodservice operation. As an operator, you have many different irons in the fire, but thinking about modifying and changing employee behavior can have positive results throughout the organization, not just in the realm of food safety.

There are many aspects to anyone’s actual behavior. Taking the time to think through why an employee might do what they do can be key to changing their behavior for the positive – whether it be food safety related or not. As we have noted before, every operation has a food safety culture, we are hoping yours is a positive one. And if your culture is not quite there yet, perhaps exploring ways to encourage behavior change among your employees may be on the menu for the new year.

We hope you were able to join us on November 17th for our last SafeBites webinar of 2021, entitled, “Practicing Good Agriculture: A Primer for Foodservice Operations”. We will be announcing dates for the 2022 Safebites Webinar Series in the next month or so. If you have topics, you’d enjoy learning more about, please reach out and let me know. Risk Nothing.

Evaluating Food Safety

One of the suggestions I made in the last blog was to assess the food safety culture in your organization by observing the food handling techniques of workers. Let’s explore that some more. You can do an overall assessment or you can hone in on specific areas of the operation, such as production or cleaning practices. Remember, when the environmental health inspector visits your operation, he/she just gets a snapshot of what is going on in your operation on that particular day at that specific time. You are there nearly every day, so you have a much better understanding on what really happens in your operation.

September is Food Safety Education Month: The Culture of Food Safety

Developing a culture of food safety is important for any foodservice operation. You may be wondering--just what is a culture of food safety? Let’s start talking about it by first defining what is meant by culture. When you look culture up in the dictionary, you will see terms such as shared knowledge, beliefs, values, attitudes, and meanings; a way of life; patterns of behavior; learned behavior of a group of people; and transmitted from generation to generation. I think these descriptors provide good insight into the meaning of a culture of food safety. You can also think about where you grew up, and a vision of culture comes. For example, I grew up in rural Oklahoma, graduating in the 1970’s with a class of 24 students. My culture instilled in me an appreciation for rural life, hard work, and independence. As I grow older, I realize I haven’t changed very much from my early years, even though I have completed a PhD, lived a lot of places, and traveled throughout the world!

Produce Safety: Special Considerations

In our last blog, I talked about general produce safety. Today, I want to talk about some special products—melons, tomatoes, leafy greens, and sprouts. These are all foods that have a history of bacterial contamination leading to foodborne illness. I also want to discuss salad bars because they have some special risks.