New research conducted at the Harvard Business School found that 19 million foodborne illnesses and 51,000 hospitalizations, and billions of dollars in medical-related costs could be avoided each year if federal food safety inspectors do one simple thing: tweak their schedules.
The research is detailed in “How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections,” a paper co-written by doctoral student Maria Ibanez, and Mike Toffel, a Harvard Business School professor. The study was prompted by Ibanez’s own curiosity regarding how scheduling affects workers’ behavior, and how that affects their productivity and quality of their work, along with Toffel’s interest in studying the effectiveness of inspections of global supply chains and factories in the U.S. Although previous research seems to link the accuracy of third-party audits to the inspector’s gender and work experience, Ibanez and Toffel liked the idea of focusing on the effects of scheduling because it’s an easy fix for inspectors and their managers to implement.