I’ve been quite enjoying the food safety and quality culture topic – from a systems and compliance perspective, this one makes for an interesting kind of problem because you have to try to ascribe objective metrics to what seems like an inherently subjective topic.
I seem to have come at this one from a slightly different angle, so I’ll try to outline some of my thinking:
‘Culture’ = Shared values, beliefs, motivations, social influences, expectations, rationales, standards and ethics held by a group.
Culture cannot be directly measured, but you can make observations about the behaviour of the group that can give you meaningful information about its culture. Certain activities like handwashing are frequently cited as indicating a good quality culture, for example.
Systematically, compliance with the site’s quality management system can be used as a metric applied to an organisation’s quality behaviour. Relatively high compliance would be seen as organisational quality behaviour indicating that food safety and quality is highly influential on the culture, whereas relatively high non-compliance would indicate that food safety and quality are of low importance to the organisational culture.
Of course, compliance can’t be a stand-alone KPI for food safety and quality culture. This raises the question: if an organisation had an ideal food safety and quality culture, what sort of behaviours would be expected?
Fault-reporting would be a measurable performance indicator. You can categorise fault reports as 'proactive' or 'reactive', based on the source of event information. Customer complaints are reactive, whereas audit nonconformities are proactive, for example. The ratio of proactively-reported weaknesses in your QMS against versus reactive incidents can give an objectively measurable indicator for that organisational behaviour. The argument here is that proactive/preventative fault-reporting is organisational quality behaviour that indicates that being proactive/preventative about risks to product safety, quality and legality is of high importance to the organisational culture.
It follows that root cause analyses should yield significant indicators for food safety and quality culture, too. Every instance of non-compliance can be examined for common influencers that are causing non-compliance. Similarly, there may be cultural factors that can contribute into the root cause for non-conformance – so for example, if a high staff turnover is causing functional instability and competence issues due to lack of experience and training, staff retention could be looked at as a cultural root cause.
Responsive actions can also provide metrics for organisational quality behaviour. The ratio of corrective actions versus preventative actions carried out over a given timeframe can be used as an indicator for cultural values. If an organisation carries out 5 preventative actions for every 3 corrective actions one year, and the following year the same organisation carries out 6 or 7 PAs for every 3 CAs, then that would be a useful metric to demonstrate quality culture development over time.
It’s the ability to apply objective performance metrics here that I find most interesting. The BRC Food standard V8 seems to place a real importance on being able to measure and improve the food safety and quality culture:
“The site’s senior management shall define and maintain a clear plan for the development and continuing improvement of a food safety and quality culture. This shall include:
•defined activities involving all sections of the site that have an impact on product safety
•an action plan indicating how the activities will be undertaken and measured, and the intended timescales
•a review of the effectiveness of completed activities.”
Measurement and the review of effectiveness of actions taken are significant for compliance, but ‘culture’ is such an intangible thing.
This is such a new and unfamiliar requirement; I think there’s a lot of scope to approach the problem with new solutions. Food safety and quality culture isn’t reduceable to a series of performance metrics because the nature of the thing’s far more complex and nuanced than that. For all that (even anonymous) surveys suffer from subjectivity and self-reporting biases, I think auditors are going to expect to see some kind of survey included in the measurement of quality culture no-matter what else you measure. The ideal compliance system would probably trend as many quantifiable performance metrics as possible, supplemented by human/psychological/subjective inputs in the form of anonymous surveys etc.
I’d be interested to know if there are other objective metrics anyone’s using for food safety and quality culture.
