Getting Caught Up in Food Safety

Chartwells develops low-cost incentives targeting work-related injuries and sanitation

By Scott Hume, Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 6/1/2003

Involving employees in workplace safety and sanitation programs is good. Involving managers is even better.

So says Tim Weatherly, resident district manager for Chartwells Education Dining Service at Southeast Missouri State University (SMSU) in Cape Girardeau. Last year, Weatherly developed and instituted a safety and sanitation incentive program for the university’s foodservice employees (75 professional staffers plus a like number of part-time student workers). It proved so successful that this year it has been offered to other colleges managed by Chartwells, a division of Raleigh, N.C.-based Compass Group North America.

Designed to reduce the amount of time lost due to safety-related injuries and to improve compliance with Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point sanitation guidelines, SMSU’s I Got Caught! program rewards employees whom managers spot adhering to safety and sanitation principles, from monitoring food temperatures to using proper gloves in food handling or quickly mopping up potentially hazardous spills. The employee is given an I Got Caught! pin and his or her name is placed in a fishbowl. Each month, the person whose name is drawn receives a $50 gift certificate from a retailer and a T-shirt with the program’s logo and fish mascot. An additional drawing is held if no workdays are lost to injuries during the month.

Conversely, employees seen violating safety and sanitation rules—cleaning a slicer without first unplugging it, for example—have one of their entries removed from the fishbowl. Such instances are called “sinkers” in the program’s fishing-themed terminology.

“We wanted our associates to focus on their sanitation and safety habits, and we wanted management to focus on them too,” says Weatherly, whose team includes a total of nine managers and assistant managers. “The key to a program like this is getting management to pay attention to safety and sanitation. If they’re not, if it’s not high on managers’ priority lists, then the program’s not worth anything. The employees pay attention only if managers do.”

REDUCING LOST TIME
Weatherly says the program produced measurable improvements. During the 2001 school year, safety-related injuries to five employees resulted in a total of 67 lost workdays. Last year, two injuries resulted in 11 lost days. Knowledge of and adherence to food-safety standards also rose, Weatherly says. This year he provided an additional incentive: If there were no work-related injuries from August 2002 through May 2003, Weatherly offered to be the target for cream pies thrown by the staff. As of the first of May he still was preparing for his dessert binge.

In addition to being effective, I Got Caught! is cost-efficient. The $75 Chartwells operations pay to adopt SMSU’s program covers posters, banners, pins, tracking methodology and a manual.