Training Supplement: How Training Can Positively Alter Your Culture

Exciting times, everyone! We went from the crisis of COVID-19 right into the era of the great resignation. The food industry has been on the front lines, smack dab in the middle of both war zones. I have great news for you all: We have hit the bottom, and it’s uphill from here. With COVID behind us, we can use the updated research to tackle the great resignation. The companies that implement culture changes the fastest will be the first to recover from these unprecedented times.

First, we need to understand what researchers have found as the underlying issues for the great resignation. Once we understand “why,” we can create solutions to fix the internal cultural issues. Score.org for years has done an employment engagement survey, and the 2023 data is very enlightening:

Do you see a pattern here? The verbs that keep popping up, like the whack-a-mole arcade game, are hiring, retaining, motivating and engaging employees. Real training is the key to positively altering your culture and hiring, retaining, motivating and engaging your amazing employees.

Training Versus Educating

Through my 20 years of working with thousands of companies in the food industry, I have consistently seen a total misunderstanding of what training is. Let’s start with what training is not. It is not education.

Many companies have spent thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars implementing awesome “education” programs in the belief that these are training programs. You are missing a huge opportunity if your “training” program wholly consists of sitting employees in front of a computer screen to watch a video, or series of videos, encompassing:

• Company history
• Company philosophy, mission, values, etc.
• Food safety program
• Job expectations
• And more

Companies that implement culture changes the fastest will be the first to recover.

As the former co-founder of traintocomply.com, who created hundreds of food safety education videos, I can tell you the above is not training — it is educating. 

A couple months ago, I was able to experience this firsthand. My business partner Andy Kennedy and I started a company called New Era Partners, LLC, under iFoodDS. Kennedy is a traceability expert that assisted in writing the new FDA traceability rule, FSMA 204. After reading the 600-page rule and sitting through many education sessions, I thought I had a true understanding of the new law. But it wasn’t until he and I walked through the first few distribution facilities assisting companies trying to comply with the rule that I was “trained” on how compliance would really work. Theory and practicality are very different.

Another analogy is the difference between knowing what is healthy for you and doing what is healthy for you. Many people, myself included, have read many articles, watched many videos, been given medical advice and fully understand what should be done to be healthy. The day in and day out of actually doing the work to be healthy is the hard, culture-shifting activity.

Real Training Will Help with Understanding the Why

“Why, Why, Why, Why?” If you have ever been around a child in kindergarten, you will get this one-word question all the time. While many people stop asking “why,” that doesn’t change the base desire to know why. Companies have a head start if they understand that every member of their team is a human being, and most human beings are curious. Why? Because those companies have created the culture of consistently explaining the why.

Education can be very efficient at explaining the why in detail, and most companies do this. The best companies consistently hammer the why, training on it every minute of every day. It is hard not to be an engaged, motivated employee when you understand the bigger picture and how your tasks affect the overall corporate goal. 

A great example is a company I visited a few months ago. At the beginning of the shift, all the managers took turns explaining what the goals were for each department. They then explained that while their goal was X number of packages of product, customers are their No. 1 priority, and each employee has a role in creating the best and safest product. Each manager spent 3-5 minutes each, and the overall standup meeting was about 20 minutes long. At the end of the meeting, all the employees gathered around in a circle and chanted their values, which included safe quality products. Every employee looked engaged, motivated and excited to work. Impressive.

How Training Will Change 

The tools for education and training have grown exponentially over the last couple decades. While these tools are amazing resources and will keep getting better, they are not a panacea or silver bullet. You can’t just create a training module and have employees watch it and be done. Maybe in the future, Elon Musk’s Neuralink will be like Neo learning kung fu in “The Matrix” — put the plug into the brain, download the module and that’s it, you have your black belt. Until this sci-fi becomes reality, training is a constant human interaction with another human.

Technology is getting crazy good. One of my clients uses Microsoft Hololens to have facility maintenance employees do difficult tasks, like fixing expensive equipment. An expert from corporate sees what the maintenance man is doing and coaches him. This same technology could be used for audits, inspections and training. This technology saves thousands if not millions of dollars in travel, expenses and talent. Yet, it still involves using one person to coach another.

Training Is a Huge Step in Creating a Good Food Safety Culture

The great resignation has the potential to wind up creating amazing food safety cultures. The companies that embrace the following understanding of the new normal will have a better, more committed workforce. People in America are telling employers:

• They want to be treated like human beings, not robots.
• While pay and benefits are important, loving the work is also very important.
• They want to believe their work is valuable.
• Values are not words on a website but are embraced minute after minute, day after day.

Regardless of if a person is a quantity buyer value-shopping for the least expensive food item or a quality buyer looking for the non-GMO, organic, sustainable product, everyone agrees on one thing: When they eat their food, they don’t want to die. Food safety is a very easy value to get for everyone, regardless of race, religion, income and where you are on the corporate ladder. Rallying the troops around the common goal of creating safe, quality products creates the foundation of why for all other tasks.  

Here’s an example conversation with an employee on a tomato-sorting line: “Hey Beverly, your job is important. You are the last eyes making sure all the product leaving the line is of the best quality. Thank you for wearing gloves that keep you and our customers safe. You did miss a few cracked tomatoes, though. Let’s remember only the best for our valued customers.”

The tools for education and training have grown exponentially. 

Or what about the guy watching the tote go into the hopper? “Jorge, why did you stop the line? Ah, you saw rats in the product from the field and didn’t want them processed. Great job — no one wants that in the product we sell to our customers; they are like family, and we wouldn’t want to feed that to our kids. Let’s clean this up and get the line moving again.”

Maintenance can get in on it too: “Exactly, Bob, we need the rust removed and repainted to keep the nasty bacteria from finding a convenient hiding place to contaminate our product. And thank you for checking that oil tray. While the oil is food grade, no one wants to eat food with machine oil on it.”

Constant, consistent conversations like the ones above, minute after minute, day after day, are the magic training that creates an amazing culture where employees not only know the why but do the why. They understand what they do, why they do it, and embrace the organizational values.