Do your employees need a food safety checkup?

Using checklists to evaluate your employees’ skills is a good way to determine the effectiveness of food safety training.

By watching employees and comparing their actions to a checklist of procedures, you will quickly be able to find the parts of your training program that weren’t memorable, and what to concentrate on during refresher training.

This exercise is good for training areas that don’t require periodic refresher training. If you observe employees washing their hands, wearing hairnets that cover all of their hair, and using gloves appropriately, you can be pretty sure they’re remembering their personal hygiene training.

Be careful
You don’t want to intimidate employees, so tell them you are doing the evaluation for your own benefit. Using checklists to point out minor infractions or to catch someone “in the act” can backfire. People may tend to disappear or become angry when they see you coming.

Use this method for positive reinforcement and fact-finding. Employees will be much more open to the process if they understand that nothing bad can happen to them when they’re being evaluated. You’d rather have people curious to find out how they did than have them arguing about unfairness.

How to prepare the lists
A short checklist that is focused on one topic will allow you to evaluate more employees. A longer checklist that integrates several subjects can be used to evaluate a department, or even all of the training you’ve conducted in the last six months. Above all, make the checklist easy to use. Make sure it highlights the most important points that were covered in the training.

What subjects can be covered?

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