Effective ways to educate your staff

Staff education a way to achieve a strong, empowered work force that are all working towards to a common goal. Knowledge is power. The more you are educated, the more empowered you are to make better choices. In the realm of food safety, this is no different. Having staff that understand your food safety goals is yet a step closer in providing the safest product to your consumer.  In this post I go through effective ways to educate your food business staff a to enable a more intelligent workforce.

Workplace Signage

Signage is everywhere, but how effective is it? Do you change your signage on a routine basis? Do food production staff actually notice what is written on the signs?  Workplace signage is probably one of the easiest ways to educate your staff. However, some thought needs to be put into the words and images that you use to convey your chosen message.

Focus Points

Focus points or one point lessons are great for conveying a single point.  It allows you to focus on one point without clouding it with multiple messages. Focus points work great as part of weekly or monthly staff education campaigns. Take this opportunity to use focus points in your food business. You can use posters or signage around your food business to articulate the focus point. For my clients, I like to have a new focus point every fortnight. These are usually displayed on the back of toilet and bathroom doors and on the staff notice board.

Toolbox meetings

Sometimes what you need to communicate is best achieved through a face-to-face session. This is where toolbox meetings come. Toolbox meetings are generally a quick verbal rundown of important issues affecting your food business. You can use tool-box meetings to convey focus point messages. You can think of them as being the pep-talk given to a team before a big game.

On-the job training

For more formal staff education, nothing beats on-the-job training. It allows the participant to not only learn the theoretical side of a food safety tasks but to then put it into practice immediately. This really follows the training methodology of “I show you”, “we do it together” and then “you show me”. This is a great method to show actual participant competency. It also caters for participants who learn kinetically.

Formal training

Formal training is where a participant undertakes a structured course which is usually external to the business. It generally involves a heavy emphasis on theory but can also include practical elements. This is a good way to obtain information on more formal staff education like legislation updates, how-to or more technical requirements. Check out the HACCP Mentor training options by clicking here.

Your preferred staff education system

How do you train your staff? What type of sessions do you deliver? Share your experience and knowledge with the HACCP Mentor community by leaving a comment below this post.

 

14 thoughts on “Effective ways to educate your staff”

  1. kayode Balogun

    Amanda…thanks for sharing.

    Adding to your list , the following could also make training effective especially in the 21st century business environment :

    1. Conference collateral
    2. Dashboard design
    3. Data visualization
    4. eBooks
    5. Brand Identity
    6. Motion Graphics
    7. Interactive content
    8. Info-graphics

  2. On the job training,toolbox meetings and workplace signages are the exact ones employed in my company.They are exciting and easily grasped by the staff who are involved in large scale catering business.Rarely do we have external training as it tends to be a constraint to the budget.Of importance also on workplace signage is the positioning of the posters.We display them right in their respective production workstations.

    I find Focus Points which you have mentioned as an interesting one and its frequency of change and i will try this one too.

    Thanks for sharing Amanda.

  3. thanks for sharing this information. i have a few signages and do formal trainings with a few one point lessons. The toolbox meeting sounds like a great way also so wi will hopefully be implementing that.
    Thanks Amanda

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