Pieter Vos: Hygiene: people make the difference

You keep a neat record of how often a room is cleaned, you use inspections to check compliance with personal hygiene guidelines, and you carry out measurements to determine the presence of micro-organisms. Threshold values have been set to help you steer your actions. Then one day an alarming lab result comes in: Listeria has been found! Everyone panics. How could this happen? You had your KPIs, didn’t you? And every employee completed the mandatory e-learnings!

But hygiene isn’t about KPIs. It’s about people. About how they work and why they do things the way they do. That’s why the first thing I do when I visit a food company is observe, sense, and analyze. The average NVWA inspector does the exact same thing. Not happy with what they see? Then they’ll grab a flashlight, often only to confirm what they already suspected at first glance.

I know how challenging it can be to safeguard and secure hygiene, especially on a multicultural production floor. All those nationalities, the differing values and norms, the language barriers and countless Tower of Babel moments. How do you align everyone? Certainly not with a standard e-learning, taken at the end of a tiring workday, filled with photos of production lines from other factories, other products, and other situations. Completely unrecognizable. 'Click-click-click. Let’s get this over with. Time to go home.' It must, and can, be different.

We sit together in small groups. In person, not online. This way every employee is seen and has a voice. Together we review the photos and videos I took in their factory: real situations and real products in specific places. On the floor, for example, and then back on the conveyor belt. I ask them questions: ‘Would you prepare it this way at home? Would you eat the product that was made here yourself? Would you give it to your children or parents? And do you know what the consequences of poor hygiene can be for someone’s health — your family’s, or a stranger’s?’ Believe me, the answers cross every cultural boundary.

If you want change, the key words are recognition, acknowledgement, and awareness. Dirty is dirty. And you should never, absolutely never, turn a blind eye to it.

Pieter Vos
Consultancy & Interim Management