Evaluating Your Risk Management Framework

Evaluating Your Risk Management Framework

If you have been following the risk management steps that we have been discussing in Season 2 of “Off the Menu”, you should have implemented the framework by now. In Episode 5, Peter and I chat about effectively evaluating the risk management framework and how it has been implemented.

The core focus of the evaluation process is to determine if the implementation has been effective or not. There are several aspects to focus on including:

  1. How often they are conducted
  2. What the evaluation should focus on
  3. How to determine if changes needs to be made to the framework

Frequency of evaluation

The frequency of when the risk management framework should be evaluated is related to the confidence in the system. You need to understand your confidence level, and that comes from the amount of data and planning you’ve done to set up in the first place.

You would do more evaluations in the beginning. As time goes along, you reduce the number of evaluations that you need to do because you’re building up a level of confidence not only your team and culture, but also the process to deliver the outcomes. At a minimum, you should be conducting monthly internal assessments to make sure that whatever you have put in place is working.

Conducting deeper dives

When your confidence in the system has grown, you would then go to six monthly deeper dives. We want to see that what we’ve put in place is delivering a change in how we’re doing things in order to get to the desired outcome.

So what does that really mean? It means did we save money somewhere? Did we reduce the number of errors that were occurring in the system? Did we change the way people are thinking about risk on site?

Evaluating behavioural changes

In this context, what we are talking about with risk is behavioural changes. We are looking at ways of evaluating behavioural change in personnel. This could come down to interviewing, observance of practices and behavioural assessments of people or even a culture mapping exercise of the organisation (6-12 months after implementation). What we are trying to do is change people’s perception of risk.

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Potential issues for annual evaluations

If we decided to do our evaluations annually, would this be too far out?

Peter believes that in the first-year annual evaluations are too far out because by then you could be implementing a lot of bad habits, or you could be implementing a system that’s making no change

You could be implementing something that’s making the conditions worse. Therefore, you’re best off doing more checking in the beginning and then scale back as the first year passes by.

A reactive perspective and root cause analysis

From a reactive perspective, Amanda mentions that you would be re-looking at or evaluating your system if say you had a complaint that needed investigation.

As, and when things pop up, you would be doing what’s called root cause analysis. So firstly, you’re going to solve the issue that’s come to hand, whatever that issue might be. That’s a risk related issue.

But then what you really want to do is perform a root cause analysis on it to see what created that in the first place. You can then start working on that to ensure that that doesn’t occur again, or the likelihood of that occurring again is significantly reduced.

The focus of the evaluation

When you have decided on the frequency of evaluating your risk management framework you need to identify your areas of focus. Firstly, we’re looking for how well things are embedded.

In a previous episode we talked about implementing tool-box meetings. Using that type of activity as an example, we want to see that they’re being maintained and not only they’re maintained, but we want to go and judge the quality of the conversation that’s occurring at it.

We are looking to see that there is a deeper conversion occurring. For example, was there any issue that presented itself? And then how do we go about problem solving it? How can we improve a particular issue.

That’s the sort of level of conversation that we’re actually looking for. So we’re looking for the implementation in the early days, and then we’re looking for signs of sustainable practices as well.

In other words, people are more proactive to towards identifying risk and then managing the risk.

Risk identification and rectifying issues

An easy way to see if staff are becoming more engaged in the risk management process can be via the risk register, near miss log or corrective action records.

You may find more people or different people are starting to fill out the logs or records than the usual suspects. Maybe more ‘near-miss’ incidents are being logged by your staff.

Requirements for food safety culture

We see in the majority of GFSI recognised standards that company or product cultural is fundamental to the success of an organisation. Requirements for food safety culture or product culture goes beyond just meeting performance indicators. It really is about changing the behaviours of staff so as to improve the overall food safety for the business.

Assessing the success of behavioural change

Amanda goes on to ask Peter what are ways that we can assess the success of behavioural change? Through the interview conversation and observation process we’re looking for behavioural indicators. We’re looking for how people are doing things differently. Here are some examples to provide context.

  • Do staff leave production doors open or do they remember to close doors behind them?
  • Do people wash their hands are coming back from a break or just walk straight past the hand-wash stations?
  • Have staff found a fire door that is not alarmed and then chocked it open with a brick or are the doors closed as required?

“You may think that these things are small things, but they really talk to the mindset and the behaviours displayed on site. It is those issues that build up root cause analysis that turn into bigger problems”.

Ignoring blatant issues

To wrap up this section on behaviour change, what we’re really looking for is something a little bit more forensic like, Hey, did someone just walk past that ripped bag of product in the warehouse and it’s spilling on the floor and no one did anything about it? And I just watched 15 people walk past that bag of rip product. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s the behavioural change.

Reporting on behavioural change

Amanda asks Peter if it is helpful for businesses to identify what is the current behaviour and also what they want the behaviour to become. Could this help with reporting outcomes? Peter uses the issue of walking past a bag of ripped product to explain further.

After six months of that, so month one 15 people walk past it, you’re coming back month six, what we’re seeing is not only that there was no rip bag, but that there was, other people talking to other people in the factory about what it means to keep a clean work environment.

Sometimes you can’t directly see the outcome that you’re seeking. So like five people walking past doesn’t constitute a good result. What we want to see is, (let’s say there is a ripped bag, and someone walked past), the outcome is that someone else would then follow that person up and say, Hey, did you realise you just walked past an open bag of product? And then they both fix the problem together. That’s the sort of outcome we are looking for. That’s quite a big shift in behavioural change.

Determining if changes are needed to your framework

Based on your evaluation process your will then need to determine if you need to make any changes to your initial risk management framework. You will need to dig a little deeper than looking at the peripheral results you get.

What we are looking for is the whole of company change towards the vision. That’s where we’re rolling up all of these indicators back up towards the strategy, which is, are people really buying into the strategy? Has it become sticky? Is it sustainable? Can we keep individuals accountable and are they willing to be held accountable for issues? So that’s the sort of thing we’re looking for.

If we’re not getting that, then we need to be tweaking certain areas. It could be more communication, more training, more supervision. It could be, in some cases more incentives to keep people moving on the same path that you want them to be on.

Wrap Up

In this episode we have discussed (amongst other things), evaluating your risk management framework. We have looked at how often we should conduct these evaluations. We’ve also reviewed what those evaluations should focus on – the purpose, your implementation plans, your indicators, and your expected behaviour that you’re getting from people. Finally we signed off with determining whether or not changes need to be made to your framework after doing that evaluation.

You can read an article on Evaluating Your Risk Management Framework that Peter has written by clicking here.

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