The key thing with all incentives is that you get buy in for them at the management level. If management don’t actively believe and encourage these ideas then the practices and goals you wish to establish might die on the vine before they’ve had a chance to take root in the business.
Education, training, supervision, and feedback are the areas that you need to focus on. Changing the culture in your organization is difficult, but from personal experience working with companies across a variety of industries I’ve seen the following approaches adopted which you might find helpful.
You could institute a monthly class or workshop so staff are being continuously versed in best practices. These classes might have an extra benefit as they also give employees a break from the floor and make them more proactive in their approach to food safety.
Have more meetings and discussions where you can talk about and evaluate your current system. In these meetings look at it as objectively as you can and ask if your current system is operating as well as it could be. In these meetings you should encourage open and honest feedback (maybe through an anonymous suggestion box?) and encourage employees to submit any ideas or suggestions for improving your practices. It’s important to treat all ideas fairly and not dismiss any out of hand so that nobody feels dejected or embarrassed, and they will keep continuing to submit their ideas in the future. If you have structures in place that allow the staff to communicate with each other there is a greater likelihood that knowledge, learnings and observations they have will be shared amongst each other.
I know this might seem obvious but unless you’re touching base with your staff regularly, and reassuring them that their input is valued and welcomed, they might feel less incentivized to provide any observations or thoughts they have and this will cause problems that could easily be remedied to go unchecked.
Focusing on the key areas of education, training, supervision and feedback all add to the person’s consciousness and will improvement their engagement and approach to food safety. Once you have all 4 well established as well they should start becoming cyclical as the feedback is taken on board and implemented effectively.
On a more general level is there anything you can do to improve the working environment? Even treating employees to the ‘better’ coffee beans once in a while can have a massive improvement on productivity and loyalty. Not to mention it’ll also be a nice reward for you and your hard work in motivating them as well J
