Ideas for raising food safety awareness and driving improvement?

Hi, (I'm new here by the way, hi!)

I've been having interesting discusions with a group of our factory manager's about the best way to drive improvement with our food safety standards. We are a low risk food manufacturer with A grade BRC certification across all sites, but, as I'm sure you all find, retailers aren't accepting this as THE certification anymore, and we are finding that A grade sites are coming out with amber ratings from more than one retailer.

We are working on speciic corrective actions, and I've rewritten our audit programme to incorporate the additional requirements, but we need some clever ideas for empowering the workforce to take responsibility for food safety and quality, in the same way they do health and safety (which is very good)

I'd like to emphasise that we don't have food safety issues as such, we have low level complaints and no product recalls in the last few years, etc.

However, we are struggling to make the step change to meet the retailers expectations.

We have covered the obious, training, measurement, objectives etc, but everything seems to be very much 'been there tried that' and I'd like to really make a difference. I've only been with the company for a year, and can already see some improvements, but the progress is slow, and now with financial ties being greater than ever, I need some imagination with this!

Any ideas?

(apologies for the loooonnnggg ramble there!)

J

Great question J. Right now I’m in the process of completing the NEBOSH Certificate for Health & Safety and although you may think - what??? The same rules apply for raising awareness and driving improvement. We are still dealing with people, process, plant and product and we want them to work in harmony with failure reduction and continuous improvement enhanced.
To help me in preparation for the exam I made all of the handouts into a couple of powerpoint slides which I have attached. It may seem a lot to take in at first but it makes sense to me now and if you want to discuss any aspect further I’m happy to. In a nutshell the behavior of an individual or employees on the whole is affected by organizational, job and individual factors and they all need to be considered and addressed if we want to achieve our goals effectively. Before the course I also had never realized quite how complex human error is.

One thing I would add is that employee involvement is the key. Involve employees in the development of procedures, in HACCP reviews, in audits (customer, third party), supplier visits, complaint investigations etc. In anything and everything always chuck in an employee or two. This involvement develops perception (understanding), attitude and motivation and without this all other efforts will be limited.

Great topic, welcome to the forums J.

Regards,
Simon

Human_error.ppt   232KB   114 downloads
Prevention_of_Error.pdf   182.03KB   101 downloads

Thank you! I will sit and have a read through your attachments this evening, very helpful thank you.

Yes, you're right, Human error is very complex! The simplest yet most impossible thing to resolve!!

Fab site by the way, I got very distracted from my work yesterday reading through old but relelvant topics! Happy in the knowledge that it was all work related....

J

Interactive theme days! I've done these before with competitions, posters etc. It might sound cheesy but it gets the issues up the agenda! I've done food safety wordsearches in the company magazine, taken part in food safety week (well, when I remember, possibly the FSA's worst publicised initiative!)

Then there's the boring stuff, there's a weekly brief which goes out and is put on notice boards. The colour of the paper is changed every week so people can see it's changed at a glance.

I agree with Simon that involvement is really important but also a bit of give and take, it's easy to be seen as ivory tower in technical so if you're trying to get them to believe technical is part of their job, having some interest in operations should be part of the technical remit too.

I think the point of all this isn't to remove human error because you can't but at least to remove that "I don't care" feeling when people see something wrong but can't be bothered to sort it out.

Good idea! I did an interactive week for ur business management system last year, complete with 'BMS cake' on the final day....worked well, I guess I could translate the same sort of idea somehow..


Off to ponder.....

Good idea! I did an interactive week for ur business management system last year, complete with 'BMS cake' on the final day....worked well, I guess I could translate the same sort of idea somehow..


Off to ponder.....

BMS cake - surely that would cause acute indegestion.