Food Safety and Food Safety Training
This blog has several postings about food safety training. By now, if you’ve read all of them, you’ve had your fill of food safety training. What do you need training for, to know how to wash your hands? On the surface, food safety is certainly not rocket science; every employee should understand it. The concepts seem logical and clear cut. This posting talks about the importance and benefits of food safety training, its complexity, why you, your employees and even retired sanitarians need it.
Part of the problem is a misunderstanding of what the terms ‘training’ and ‘education’ mean. This training is not the same as schoolbook learning. Both terms imply a passive student who sits in a chair absorbing information and not participating in the process. The assumption is that knowing things, attending a class, passing an exam, will be automatically followed by changes in behavior. In fact, the author has had several students pay their registration fee and demand their certificate, as if they had completed a sale.
With that assumption, small wonder training is so often a failure. Behavioral change is not that simple. There are any number of dependent elements which must happen before changes occur. First, a student in a food safety training program must physically attend the program. That sounds easy enough but many students arrive late, leave early and don’t participate. Next, he or she must listen and receive the information, developing a belief and attitude about its usefulness. Third, they will develop an intention to act on the information. If that intention is positive, clearly defined to an immediate time and place (“I intend to change my dish washing procedure starting immediately”) and the person has it in their power to act (they know they can do it, nothing is stopping them), then perhaps their behavior will change. Otherwise the entire educational effort might be lost.
The student’s intention to act might be strong in a well delivered training program; however without attaining competency in the required skill, the intention might sour, regress, turn negative from discouragement. The instructor’s task is to make the change attractive through demonstration and practice sessions. The result, a benefit of effective training, is going to be increased worker morale and productivity.
It is important that the behavioral change is clearly defined with a specific method and time period. A general expectation (“In the future, we expect you to start apply the information from the program”) results in general results, allowing students to interpret how, when and where to do certain things. A specific objective might be …’Starting on Friday, we expect you to clean and sanitize the equipment according to the process just described in this program. A poster has been placed above the sink so you won’t forget’.
During one practice training exercise, a student gave a behavioral objective: “at the end of the program, 80% of the students will wash their hands properly”. This objective has several major errors! The information must be used by every student, not just a few. Further, the word ‘properly’ is general and open to interpretation; public health is a specific concept.
The student must feel competent and enabled to do the task. It is also important that the presenter is credible, competent and persuasive, both to themselves and to their students. This is done by researching and reviewing the information prior to the program, talking to experts and rehearsing the presentation in front of a friendly audience.
Helpful Tips (1): Students will be more likely to perform the behavior if they respect the presenter, the presenter is an important person, the presenter performs the behavior themselves and students infer from that there is pressure for them to at attempt the behavior. So, if the important people in the workplace are absent, do not present the training and do not attempt the required behaviors, the students can easily assume the training is unimportant (1).
Helpful Tips (2): Presenting the information several times in different ways helps to reinforce the concepts. Keep the program short and simple, dividing up complicated tasks into several programs. Relating humorous or embarrassing stories, talking about personal interests such as cooking, music, reading or sports shows students their instructor is human.
(1) Fishbein and Ajzen Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research Addison-Wesley 1975 p. 401