Tips to measure food safety culture and food safety behaviour
Tips to measure food safety culture and food safety behaviour
Taking place:
Friday, 05 February 2016 - 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM UK Time
This is a 10.00 AM Eastern US Start
Presenter:
Brita Ball, Principal Consultant - Advancing Food Safety Culture, Brita Ball & Associates
Webinar Overview:
Food safety culture is a risk factor. Even if you have all the resources you need for your food safety system, people can make it or break it. A food safety culture can range from strongly negative to strongly positive. What is yours like and what can you do to make it more positive? In this webinar, you will learn what influences food safety culture, approaches to measuring food safety culture and food safety behavior (they’re different), leading and lagging indicators, and factors to consider when implementing changes to improve food safety culture and behaviors in your workplace.
Unedited chat logs from today's webinar:
Brita sent me the information below to share with you.
Thank you for participating in the IFSQN webinar I gave on Feb 5th – Tips to Measure Food Safety Culture and Food Safety Behavior. I’m excited to connect with all of you to respond to your questions and comments in the chat box and offer you a gift.
The IFSQN webinars are full of powerful information and your chat comments are an excellent way to share information with each other and ask questions. I appreciate Simon as he provides these webinars at no cost to participants. This got me thinking that some of you would benefit from a complimentary conversation to support you in assessing the priority elements of your food safety culture systems.
Social science has been called a “soft” science; Frank Yiannas says, “The soft stuff is the hard stuff.” With my background in the “hard” and “soft” sciences, I can support people navigating through the hard stuff that Frank talks about. For those that participated on the webinar I’d like to offer a complimentary conversation on the phone. I mentioned in the webinar that an objective third-party can often give insights that you wouldn’t be able to get from an internal audit or process. I also talked about the need for someone with experience in social science research to have input into your data collection and analysis if you want to effectively measure change in food safety behavior and culture.
If you’re interested in moving your company forward, I’ll take you through a complimentary, proprietary process to help you determine the things that need to be in place, and give you feedback on priorities to help you accomplish your goals. I only have a few spots available so this will be on a first-come-first-served basis for people who have goals related to food safety behavior and culture. It will be about an hour of your time. Send an email to me at brita-at-fsculture.com with “FSCulture session” in the subject line.
I’m offering this because we continue to see outbreaks and ongoing food safety problems and I really believe that every company needs to embrace food safety and have a strong, positive food safety culture as its long term goal to help solve this. My background in food science and social science gives me a unique ability to support companies in food safety education and training, behavior change and culture change. You’ve taken the first step to participate in the webinar. Your next step is to determine how to make best use of the information.
Following up on the webinar, here are answers to the specific questions and some comments in the chat box:
Responses to statements/questions:
Two books by Frank Yiannas published by Springer. Both are available in hard copy and online:
• Food Safety Culture: Creating a behavior-based food safety management system (2009)
ISBN: 978-1-4939-2488-2 (Print) 978-1-4939-2489-9 (Online)
• Food Safety = Behavior: 30 proven techniques to enhance employee compliance (2015)
ISBN: 978-1-4939-2488-2 (Print) 978-1-4939-2489-9 (Online)
Two webinars by Brita Ball, PhD, CTDP, hosted by Simon Timperley on IFSQN Food Safety Fridays (2015):
• 7 Best Practices to Improve Food Safety Culture
• 3 Areas of Focus to Make Your Food Safety Training Stick
About training and measuring training effectiveness:
• Sheena said: From my experience food safety training tends to be around what to do, rather than why and the consequences of not following the training. Changing culture without this will be extremely hard. [Brita: Agreed. The part of training that covers the “why” and the negative outcomes would ideally relate to the perspectives the learners hold about what is important. There is a whole other level of culture that relates to this and is not talked about in most food safety culture conversations because many of us are blind to anything but our own national culture. The “why” that works in one national culture may not work as well in another. This will have an impact on the ability to change food safety culture in your plant. I just finished writing an eLearning course for the Food Processing HR Council in Canada. Contact me for more details.]
• Edwin said: Observing staff and/or the process steps give a good indication of effectiveness of staff training. [Brita: Partly, Edwin. Observation is good one way to assess training about “doing” but not about knowledge on why the “doing” is important. Also, when you evaluate training based on observation, are you evaluating the trainer or the learner? The intent of training is often behavior change but what have you done during training to encourage behavior change? Don’t blame the learner if the training is not effective. Look at your training process which should include preparation, training and follow up.]
• Sheena said: Sharon - Perhaps questions around your food safety training and procedures, maybe multiple choice, will show how well your training is as well as if they understand and are following the procedures. [Brita: To measure training effectiveness using a test, a pre-test / post-test approach will help you know whether how much the knowledge they have was gained from the training. Otherwise, maybe it’s possible that people knew the information already and the training made no difference. I can support people in measuring training effectiveness.]
About differences in different groups
• James said: If the middle managers are telling the senior managers that the food safety culture is healthy, and they are not seeing red flags they are oblivious to the issue [Brita: Yes. That’s why I recommend doing food safety culture surveys at all levels. This is my area of research.]
• Christi said: We have issues with the Culture being the same across all 3 shifts. Ryan responded: Christi - good point. Perhaps a more revealing poll is how committed is each shift? [Brita: I can understand that. My research shows work unit commitment to food safety is the main predictor of food safety behavior. Since shifts and work unit areas may show differences in culture and/or behaviour you would ideally gather data from all areas, and analyze it comparing shifts/units/plants. I have measured statistically significant differences between and within plants. I can support you in identifying areas to consider for your assessments and ways to improve based on the assessments.]
About measures/surveys/assessments/data etc.
• Cory said: any suggestions for daily food safety KPI? For leadership to drive? [Brita: a number of suggestions for food safety KPIs are in the chat. Note that food safety KPIs or food safety objectives may or may not relate to food safety culture. The food safety culture or an organization (a positive or negative culture) will exist without KPIs and objectives. It has to, otherwise it’s not culture.]
• Mark said: If we are measuring new ideas such as behaviours - we need new tools - not just the same inspections and tests. [Brita: Absolutely. Food safety culture scientists are working on the best ways to measure behavior and culture that support food safety. As I mentioned in the webinar, I’m one of the food safety culture scientists in the group that focuses on this and supports the new GFSI food safety culture initiative. ]
• Cory said: Yes, we can have all these measures but it has to be communicated, and that data can be rather hard to disseminate. [Brita: Analyzing and interpreting the data is key. What are the objectives of gathering the data? That could help in determining what and how to communicate the info.]
• Bruce said: can't read the survey - will it be clearer or readable when the slides are sent out? [Brita: Not likely, Bruce. Email me so we can discuss and identify the ones that are relevant to your situation.]
• Sharon said: What kind of questions would you put on Survey Monkey? [Brita: You can put in all kinds of questions using different formats in various survey software solutions. See my comments below about design and development of surveys.]
• Laetitia said: who can support to review questions and who to analyze data? [Brita: I do this in my consulting work. See below for more detailed response about questions and data analysis.]
In-depth responses about food safety culture and behavior measurement:
• Re KPIs (key performance indicators): If you are measuring KPIs in your surveys, that’s fine. Know that you may not be measuring food safety culture when you use KPIs.
• Re behavior vs culture: As I mentioned during the webinar, even if you can observe positive food safety behavior, you may not have a strong, positive food safety culture. If you have a strong, positive food safety culture then you WILL have food safety behavior even if you’re not there watching. Maybe “Food safety=Behavior” like Frank Yiannas says, but “Food safety behavior≠Culture”.
• Re measuring behavior by observation: Observation is a good way to tell if people are doing their jobs correctly and will give you opportunity to provide positive reinforcement and/or correction as needed. If you are “counting” in your observations, be careful how you analyse the data. This approach is full of bias unless you video all behavior over a period then spend a huge amount of time reviewing the videos to measure and analyze the behavior. I can support you in doing this if this is what you’d like. The comprehensive observation helps to with assessing food safety culture, not just behavior.
• Re UK Food Safety Authority diagnostic tool for food safety culture assessment: Here is the link to the UK FSA Food safety culture diagnostic toolkit for inspectors: https://www.food.gov...245020_Tool.pdf Here’s the link to the full report: https://www.food.gov..._FS245020.pdf This toolkit has been studied as a Master’s project at the University of Guelph. I was on the student’s advisory committee. As with many things, there are strengths and limitations to the toolkit. The results have been presented but not yet published. Contact me for details.
• Re Survey questions for food safety culture and food safety behavior measures: The most important point about survey questions is that you ask valid, reliable questions that give you the information you want or need. You need to pre-test the questions. It’s no different from when you’re doing an experiment in a lab – you spend time setting up the experiment to make sure it will work. You’ll test the process before you spend the time doing the experiment, otherwise could be wasting time and resources. We want our food safety tools to be consistent and accurate, i.e. reliable and valid. Shouldn’t that be the same with survey questions? There is a lot of background work needed to do a good job at writing survey questions that are reliable and valid so they will be useful over the long term. You may want to obtain support for question writing, designing how you’ll ask questions, and determining the response options that are best for specific types of questions. How the questions are asked also makes a difference to responses. I have prepared a lot of surveys and can support you in designing the surveys and developing the questions because you’ll want your food safety culture and behavior surveys to measure accurately and consistently, just like your other tools. Otherwise you’re wasting everyone’s time and effort. Let’s use a thermometer for an analogy to survey questions:
o If the thermometer is consistently high by 2C, it’s a reliable but not valid measure of the temperature; you’ll recalibrate it. If a question consistently measures factors that don’t really relate to food safety culture, you’ll need to adjust the question.
o If the thermometer is inconsistent but always close or on temp, then it’s valid (roughly) but not a reliable measure; you may still use it if the inconsistency is not a control point (e.g. an outside thermometer for weather). If a question can be interpreted in different ways by different people then the answers cannot be compared but you won’t know that by the numbers. The mix of responses to the question might look good but not be a reliable measure.
Also, the measurements of behavior and you data analyses have to be looked at in the big picture. It’s great if you are using a system to observe behavior and log data on individuals. That can help you in different ways. Be aware that you may not be able to use that data effectively as a way to measure the effects of food safety culture because behavior change doesn’t mean culture change.
How you separate your data in analysis also makes a difference. If you group surveys from management, supervisors and workers you may inadvertently miss out on important information. The same goes for conducting surveys with only one group of employees. When different groups are expected to have different responses, it’s important to separate the groups for analysis to determine whether there is a difference.
Contact me directly if you would like questions to measure management and work unit commitment to food safety and other factors that influence behavior or would like more information about data analysis. Email: brita-at-fsculture.com
• Re sample size: You would be best to have at least 30 responses in each group and best to do a variation on random sampling (i.e. stratified random sampling unless you do the whole population/everyone in the group or plant). Fewer responses than 30 per group may not give you reliable or valid results when you do a comparison unless you’ve got the whole population responding (e.g. all 15 managers if that’s all you have in the plant). Using a small convenience sample the people in your plant (i.e. from the population) is not a good idea if you want valid and reliable data. You would want to know about the people who didn’t respond: why didn’t they respond? If they did, how would their responses be different from the convenience sample? Etc.
• Re translation: If you need to have the survey translated into another language, contact me by email. There’s a way to do this to make sure the questions mean the same thing. You must make sure the questions in all languages mean the same thing. If you don’t do a proper job at translating, you won’t be able to combine the data from the different language surveys. That would be a waste everyone’s effort.
• Re survey software: There is a pile of online survey software available. A few have free options and a bunch of paid options some which involve a monthly subscription. You can Google search and check reviews. I’ve used a couple but not enough to give you a review on the different types. If your sample size is not much more than 100, you can do a pen and paper survey and enter the data in a spreadsheet. It may end up taking less time than learning a survey tool to enter the info online then not get enough responses online or having biased sample because people aren’t doing it online.
About:
Brita Ball, PhD, CTDP – I have an integrative background that uniquely qualifies me to support food businesses in improving the effectiveness of their training and their behavior and culture change initiatives. My practical and academic work in food science and food safety, and my professional designation in performance and learning are supported by my background in leadership and organization development. I have graduate degrees in food science with a focus on food safety management, and a Master’s degree in adult education and leadership. My work experience includes production (on-farm), processing, quality control, inspection, auditing, and food safety program management for several national organizations. I also have extensive work experience supporting organizations in leadership and organization development, and facilitating strategic management and training. I have been an instructor at the University of Guelph and two colleges, and am currently adjunct professor in Capacity Development at the University. Recently, I led the design and development of eLearning courses in food safety and food safety culture for national organizations in Canada. My Certified Training and Development Professional designation with the Canadian Society for Training and Development means you can be confident in any needs assessment, instructional design, course development and delivery, and evaluation that I provide. In my volunteer roles, I am Vice-chair of the Food Safety Education Professional Development Group with the International Association for Food Protection and am a member of the Food Safety Culture Science Group that links to the new GFSI Technical Working Group on Food Safety Culture.
Hello,
I am looking for the updated link for the Food safety culture assessment tool use by the inspector.
Thank you