Company Culture and the Path to Improved Food Safety: Setting the Tone to Support a Strong Food Safety Culture
The World Health Organization has estimated that almost 1 in 10 people is sickened by eating food processed or prepared by others;[1] it is estimated that approximately 50 percent of cases of foodborne illness are due to failures in the culture of the organizations responsible for the safety of products.[2] In other words, much improvement is still required in understanding how culture can be improved to enhance food safety performance.
Good news: A global study in 2015 showed that senior leaders (e.g., C-suite, executive vice presidents) rank culture as the number one concern in their organizations for its ability to meet the challenges of the future and for the business to be sustainable and develop further.[3] They no longer use statements such as “What if culture impacts business performance”? Instead, they ask, “How and what can I do to assimilate and maintain a positive culture including food safety”?
As visionaries looking ahead 10 years, we see a landscape that goes beyond seeking compliance to where food safety lives in all levels of a food company—from the boardroom to creating new food products to processing lines and food counters: a landscape where employees earn autonomy to meet and continuously improve food safety systems and where the company’s people system flexes with the increasing complexity of the workforce. A landscape where principles of social science blend seamlessly with food science, and success is measured through behavioral consistency and team dynamics.
The path to this vision lies squarely in the culture of your company. Not in better pathogen detection technologies, certification standards, or blockchain-like solutions, but in optimizing the culture of your company to improve measurable food safety performance. Three cases from the food industry show the very specific impact of focusing on maturing culture. In a midsize Australian produce company, the culture focus resulted in a 70 percent reduction in customer complaints and a 45 percent reduction in lost-time injuries. Similarly, a large U.S. manufacturing company showed a 35 percent reduction in customer complaints, a reduction in employee turnover from 23 percent to 12 percent, a 32 percent improvement in efficiency, and a 50 percent reduction in recordable injuries. A large U.S. food distribution company surveyed its employees after a focus on culture, and across 17,000 employees, 91 percent felt connected to the company’s values, 91 percent understood how they contributed to the success of the organization, and 82 percent felt management cared about their well-being. These are just a few examples from the food industry that show the concrete values and the tangible connection between maturing culture and a company’s financial performance.
How do you deliver on this vision to show similar improvements in your company?
Find Your Path
To break down the daunting task of finding the best path for your company, the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) has published its position, developed “by leaders, for leaders,” in which 35 leaders from global companies joined the GFSI technical working group on culture in December 2015 and outlined what a culture of food safety is and how this sometimes-confusing topic can be segmented into five distinct but integrated dimensions that are relevant for any company’s culture. This special article series in Food Safety Magazine helps your company navigate this landscape of food safety; it was designed and written to continue the “by leaders, for leaders” theme of GFSI and complement its position with practical advice and learnings. As such, 19 leaders agreed to co-author five articles, each complementing a dimension of the GFSI framework (Figure 1).
The GFSI framework[4] consists of five dimensions based on a review of seven existing culture evaluation tools.[5] If you are looking to better understand your current culture and improve it, you should look at all five dimensions. No one dimension alone can strengthen your current culture. As you can see, each dimension consists of subdimensions, each identified by the GFSI group as important; for each dimension, you will find in this article series practical tactics and stories to help you continue your journey. As such, to describe the vision and mission of the GFSI position, the authors of this first article recommend seven winning practices to set a positive tone from the top down, such as be consistent and transparent in your messages, don’t underestimate the signals of allocating resources around food safety, and show that you appreciate employees’ effort and engagement in food safety. The authors describe some great practical ideas for showing that you appreciate your staff. This is also a theme in the article on adaptability, entitled “The World Is Changing and So Must Your Food Safety Expectations,” which identifies the importance of setting targets and communicating specifically and consistently. The authors of this article also recommend specific and creative ways to engage everyone in food safety, every day. The theme of engagement is at the heart of the third article, “The “A” in Culture: A Toolbox to Drive Positive Food Safety Behaviors,” where experts discuss several tools to ensure that everyone learns what competencies are important to their job and what is expected, in more than the traditional components of training. Such clarity of expectations and consistency can be measured: The authors of the article “Measure What You Treasure” discuss how this can be done by integrating food safety into measures from behaviors as leading indicators and risk assessments. Risk assessments as we know them from food science and the proven principles of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points are topics of the fifth article, “Food Safety = Culture Science + Social Science + Food Science.” The authors suggest that these principles are just one part of that equation and provide specific and practical communication and engagement tools for balancing the equation and delivering the results that we are all after: safe food, every day, everywhere.
For each “petal” (Figure 1), you will find a summary of practical ideas for you to consider in your journey. Select the one that can be integrated into your culture and your system, and create a path that is unique and impactful for improving and sustaining your company’s food safety performance!
It is no longer a matter of “whether culture impacts food safety”; it is a matter of how and of finding and committing to the best path for your company to improve. Take these learnings and apply them within your company. Accept these as valid principles; build upon them instead of obsessing with how to develop unique, bottom-up solutions. As consumers, we all deserve to be confident that we as food professionals put our effort where it can have the biggest impact: on the safety of our food.
Setting the Tone
Members of any organization look to their leaders for direction about organizational culture. A leader who sets a positive tone through word and deed and by consistently modeling and exercising good leadership principles will bring alignment and enhance the effectiveness of the organization’s culture.
Executive leaders in food companies have an opportunity to establish a dialogue within the organization to describe a desired cultural framework for food safety excellence.
This article focuses on how senior leaders, namely CEOs, the executive team, functional leaders, plant managers, and their staff, can take steps to strike the right tone to achieve their organizational culture objectives.
While we focus on the tone set internally in this article, the tone set externally is also of great importance. External stakeholders are interested in not only what product a firm makes but also how it makes it. How the firm safely produces food is increasingly of great import to consumers. Many organizations have adopted a corporate responsibility (CR) model. Consumers, investors, and employees rightfully demand transparency, trust, and credibility in how organizations fulfill their role as responsible corporate citizens. This ensures sound and ethical stewardship of the environment, sustainability, and worker health and safety. Food safety fits into this same basket, and the CR model provides a way to create an executive forum for routine review of performance in these key topics.
In this article, we share our observations of how leaders successfully set a positive tone through their actions and communications. You will learn how leaders can positively impact food safety culture based on real-world examples.
Based on our collective experience, we have identified “Seven Winning Practices” that we would expect to see from any senior leader in a food company (Figure 2). We also provide you, a food safety leader, with some practical tips to help your senior leaders set the right tone for food safety cultural excellence.
Practice 1: Ensuring Consistency
People in an organization pay attention to observed behaviors, both good and bad. When the organization sees consistency from senior leaders, it reinforces its own behaviors. Executive leaders will be noticed when attending team meetings, visiting sites, engaging business partners, and in many other situations. Their consistent adherence to proper food safety behaviors will reinforce consistent standards throughout the organization. This consistency will support the enhancement of the organization’s food safety culture. Conversely, inconsistent behavior can lead to chaos with deviations from food safety expectations and standards. This results in a less coherent culture and will be easily recognized by customers and business partners to the detriment of the organization.
Executive reinforcement of the foundational need for being the best you can be in food safety has made an impact at Land O’Lakes. An opportunity was identified several years ago, when the company’s senior food safety leaders recognized that training and education had largely focused on the plants, which at the time was the same in many food companies. Land O’Lakes determined that the leadership teams and cross-functional corporate personnel would benefit by having a greater understanding of what it meant to work in a food company with the added responsibility for making and distributing food that is safe, for both people and animals. Commitment was given for a full-day food safety workshop; initially, all senior executives attended, including the CEO, who opened and closed the event. This was followed by open attendance for all corporate staff, 800 of whom have now been through this experience. At the end of the session, each left their own written commitment with food safety leadership. This effort alone has driven food safety awareness to a whole new level across all corporate functions.
Practical suggestions for senior leaders to set the right tone in maintaining consistency:
• Always ask food safety-related questions and provide direct, immediate, and specific verbal feedback when on visits to manufacturing facilities. Use a visit as an opportunity to reinforce how expected behaviors relate to the organization’s values and food safety system requirements.
• Reinforce support for actions that assist and further the mission of cultural excellence.
• Share with teams, if appropriate, summaries of all significant meetings, executive reviews, and of any engagement with business partners where food safety is on the agenda.
Sharing your own food safety objectives and deliverables with your team is an excellent way to model accountability and transparency, and shows how individual objectives are intertwined with furthering the organization’s culture.
Practice 2: Allocation of Resources to Food Safety
Allocation of financial resources by executive leaders sends a strong message to the organization that food safety is important. These resources could be capital for plant improvements or IT system investments, expenses for training and education, travel for supplier audits, participation in external meetings, or having a requested expansion of personnel to drive and support the food safety agenda. The impact of these allocations goes beyond the immediate project. This speaks loudly to employees about the importance of food safety in the organization, thereby boosting the effectiveness of the food safety culture.
An example that we have seen involves a major frozen food firm that decided to ring-fence capital funds strictly for food safety initiatives. Previous management, a private equity firm, had not allocated resources to food safety, and therefore the organization did not believe that the new management team would invest in food safety. The ring fencing of funds sent a strong message to the organization that food safety would be an investment priority.
Another example of food safety investment sending a message is a midsize confectionary company. The sole plant of this firm needed a new roof to stop roof leaks. A project to fix the roof languished until the CEO realized that this wasn’t just a nuisance: The leak endangered consumers. The CEO quickly approved the project. This action helped set the tone that food safety was an important investment.
Practical suggestions for food safety leaders to help senior leaders set the right tone in managing resources:
• Work with the leaders of other functions to forge and maintain continuous dialogue to gain influence and support. The value of food safety in terms of minimizing risk, protecting consumers, and adding value to the bottom line should always be at the forefront of any discussion. Requests for resources should always fit within the corporate and food safety culture model and lead to positive future benefits.
• Proper framing of resource requests can enhance the likelihood of project approval. Behavioral economists have shown that framing requests in a way consistent with the approver’s style increases the chance of project approval. Food safety leaders should understand the company’s requirements and frame requests appropriately.