Focus groups for food safety culture

Hi, everyone

Instead of conducting a food safety culture survey, I am considering conducting focus groups to gather information.

I find that with the survey there's usually an opened ended question like if the respondent has any comments. The respondents tend to use this as a way for them to complain about other unrelated issues like complaining about their supervisor when they know they should report it to HR department. 

Has anyone done this before? How did your results compare with the survey? Was it more beneficial to your organisation? 

I think focus groups are great.  It could be as well as your survey to be fair to get some more meat on the bones of what is really going on.  You need to be a good facilitator though and be able to draw out quieter voices in the room and not let one person dominate.  Also if you do it instead of a survey you need to make sure you cover enough staff to make it representative.

We do employee safety committee/meetings. I haven't done that with food safety but it could work. 

The employee safety committee members change too. They seem to work and allow for employee buy in. 

Focus groups are great, I am a part of a focus group of food professionals. It's a bit unlike a company based one as all of us have volunteered time to work on the elimination (and as needed replacement with natural and/or organic) of health impact practices and ingredients.

We've done a survey last year, so my thinking is to cover the basics w.r.t food safety culture and then delve into the topics that the previous survey did not perform well in.