The dangers of cultural engagement measurement
Another topic, sorry another one I started, got me thinking about why cultural engagement scores and food safety cultural measurement often differ and not in a small way.
I was musing on this today and I came across this article:
Warning: Your Employee Engagement Scores May Be Lower than They Appear
There are a few areas which I think are interesting on this and other articles I've read and from experience.
1. Engagement scores often measure engagement and not indicators of culture. Whereas food safety culture measurement should be looking at your culture and that includes the individual not just the individual's manager.
2. Improving engagement scores is often seen as high profile and incentivised so doing activities do improve this unleashes a competitive element. Whereas for food safety culture, those scores should be seen as "that's just where we are" and if you try to improve using tools intended for mature cultures rather than immature, they won't work, so there is no incentive to fool yourself. It could be misapplied though just as it is with engagement.
3. Businesses focus on the engagement score as a leading metric and trust it, but ignore lagging metrics like voluntary staff turnover and turnover in specific departments. But in food safety culture we should be using the culture score and lagging metrics like complaints, external audit scores etc and QFS staff turnover is a VERY good metric to use.
4. Some sites "teach to the test" so just before the survey they will do lots of comms about everything you've done that year. If people felt really engaged they wouldn't need reminding.
5. Not everyone believes it to be anonymous even if it is.
6. If you're a leader or manager your score may influence the overall team score which you're then incentivised on.
7. I think as well at least the best food safety culture measurement also has direct conversations with the people they are trying to understand the culture with, not just relying on the score from a survey. This is by nature a sampling exercise but sometimes people just don't understand "what good looks like". The worst food safety cultural measurement I've seen was including a few questions into an engagement survey which basically said "everything's fine" even though they'd had two withdrawals in a month.
I still think the two should be aligned and measured together, I just think cultural engagement scores have become such a box ticking exercise (and a business health measure externally so much so that businesses are trying to get the score rather than make things better) that they're broken and need wholescale change.