There are three kinds of food manufacturing organizations: those that live food safety, those that do food safety, and those that constantly struggle to ace FDA inspections. 
We've talked about food safety culture and why it's important to train even non-food-safety employees on best practices. The next step for living food safety is to start turning best practices into ingrained habits. These actionable steps and tips can help your organization create the habits that make food safety a natural priority rather than something checked off at the very end.
The Roadblocks to Turning Actions into Habits
Just as with any kind of process engineering or failure analysis, you can't fix the problem if you can't define and isolate the problem.
- Social Pressure Toward Noncompliance: People are social creatures, and they tend to normalize behavior collectively.
- Decision Fatigue: When faced with too many choices, people rely on flawed heuristics and often opt for non-action rather than making the right decision.
- Performance Pressure / Stress: Like decision fatigue, an overwhelming pressure of conflicting priorities causes people to shut down and go with the easiest option.
- Risk / Incentive Imbalance: Economics and behavioral science teach us that people are rational — they act to optimize their personal outcomes and minimize their personal risk.
- Action / Outcome Disconnect: If outcomes aren't directly tied to individual actions, it can make people seem to act irrationally — but only because they're operating from a flawed model of the world.
Grasping these basic principles has led to some of the most important breakthroughs in behavioral science and economics over the last 30 years — unifying them won Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Understanding them in the context of managing food production facilities probably won't win anyone a Nobel, but it will make the food we eat safer, lead to better public health, and help eliminate risk for organizations.
10 Tips for Building Food Safety Habits
1. Create clear mental models for decision-making
Defining the "why" of what we're doing can often be more important than the "what" or "how." Creating clear, simple, and complete mental models for workers connects the dots between what they do, the outcomes they create, and the risks they contribute to. They also reduce decision fatigue.
As an example, a systems thinking workshop on HACCP plans can help employees connect how rushing through equipment sanitation can directly increase the chances of a major public pathogen outbreak. Using visual aids, such as pathogen spread simulations, reinforces this connection, making the consequences tangible and memorable.
2. Turn compliance into a game
Some food safety experts might recoil at the idea of treating safety as a game, but there has been significant research on the power of gamifying learning. Incorporating competitive and gamified elements like leaderboards and score-based incentives into food safety compliance tracking adds an element of intrinsic motivation that might otherwise be missing.
This is especially true if you make the "games" team-based. Not only does this motivate individuals, but it leverages peer pressure and social norm compliance to further motivate employees and assist with compliance.
3. Nudge people toward the right decision
Helping people make the right decisions is critical to forming good habits. Forcing them to make good decisions, on the other hand, can do the opposite and create resentment or cause people to shut down intrinsic decision-making entirely — go on "autopilot."
Using nudges is a more effective way to get desired outcomes. Things like clear, visual reminders of what the correct choice is can push people into making it without curtailing their freedom to make a decision. Automating optional but positive tasks, like training invites showing up on calendars, does the same.
4. Create emotional engagement with risk
Risk is often an abstract concept, and humans are bad at objectively evaluating it in casual settings. Quantifying it requires too much active thought for daily use. Instead, connect risk to your employees emotionally rather than logically.
Scenarios, whether real or acted out, help make that emotional connection. Case studies showing how a risk-assessment failure led to people getting hurt build that emotional connection. Role-playing scenarios to identify potential risk before it harms someone do, too.
5. Quantify personal loss
Decades of psychological research tell us people are more likely to take actions to prevent loss rather than make gains by almost double. In fact, this is often why food safety takes a back seat — people are more scared of losing their jobs, losing time, or losing out on hitting other goals than they are excited to gain incentives for reporting problems and taking proactive actions.
Flip the loss aversion dynamic: quantify the losses — especially the personal losses — for poor compliance. This can be done by showing the real cost of recalls or corrective actions and tying those to pay, jobs, and bonuses. Reinforce it by publicly announcing savings and other gains achieved through compliance.
6. Architect environments for good choices
Similar to using nudges, designing environments around making good decisions by limiting the number of decisions an employee has to make goes a long way toward creating habits. Environmental design has a huge impact on behavior, and facilities can harness these principles for better compliance.
This can be something as simple as handling allergen safety through color-coded equipment. If you make every piece of equipment that touches soy green, for example, your employees don't need to spend mental energy remembering which equipment is safe to use on allergen-free lines and which isn't.
7. Stack habits to create better compliance
Habits are easier to develop when they become embedded into existing routines. Food safety habits are no different. If you can identify ways to merge food safety practices with your employees' existing routines, the habits are likely to naturally follow.
Making the most of this requires you to understand your employees' habits. That, in turn, requires soliciting feedback and giving authority to shift supervisors and floor managers to identify the best places to intervene.
8. Keep people accountable
We already discussed how people aren't good at identifying and quantifying risk. One of the reasons for this is the nature of how risk is evaluated: risk = cost of occurrence × likelihood of occurrence. The disconnect is often found in the second factor — people tend to underestimate how likely bad things are to happen or how likely they are to get caught for allowing bad things to happen.
Fixing this means thorough, consistent, and visible accountability. Leveraging technology to automate accountability can bring compliance up to 100% quickly once everyone knows they can't get away with letting things slide.
9. Create a safe environment to learn
One of the hardest things about increasing compliance is learning from near-misses and almost-failures. No one wants to discuss them out of fear of being punished for getting something wrong or almost causing a disaster.
Fostering an environment where discussing these almost-weres is safe and free of negative repercussions or blame can make it easier to learn from mistakes, which encourages good habit foundation. Training managers to provide positive feedback and celebrate wins rewards people for sharing.
10. Harness peer pressure
If a culture of non-compliance makes employees less likely to comply, then a culture of compliance does the opposite. If you make food safety an important value, especially in employees with authority, that culture will become infectious.
Besides instilling these values in authority figures, other options include putting your employees on teams (see: gamification), using peer-led training to build a sense of community, and spotlighting food safety champions who go above and beyond and make good role models.
