“Everyone at the plant has a duty to protect the products that we're sending out to the customer. Ultimately, you really have to think about it as sort of a ‘circle of life.’ What's my responsibility with what I'm doing in this part of the process, and what’s going to happen when this product reaches the consumer?” - Nathan Walts, CEO, WorkForge
The success of every business is ultimately determined by its people. For that reason, companies should consider their workforce investments to be just as strategic as those made in equipment.
In food manufacturing, the focus of those investments is often learning and development, ensuring frontline employees know how to keep themselves and the product safe. This may extend to dealing with inspectors and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Despite these investments, food safety problems persist.
To better understand the challenge of ensuring food safety through workforce as well as equipment, I recently sat down with Nathan Walts, CEO of WorkForge, a learning and development solution provider focused on the food manufacturing industry.
Investing in Tailored Training
According to Nathan, production and maintenance are 60 percent of what takes place in a food manufacturing plant. Ensuring those frontline workers have the training and knowledge they need is an ongoing effort.
“We really think about it through the lens of helping an employee with that knowledge base,” he told me. “So we have lots of different areas of focus, with food safety being a really, really heavy one, a really, really critical one that happens with all new employees, and happens on a regular basis in a food safety culture, on an annual basis at the minimum at organizations.”
How companies think about the skills their employees need to have, and deciding what programs and resources to make available in support of those skills is critical. There are some skills that everyone working in the plant needs, and other skills are role dependent.
“I think that's where a lot of the real detailed magic happens,” Nathan said. “What we've seen, and this is not just specific to this industry, but there's a tilt towards a one-size-fits-all approach around learning and development and skill acquisition, skill maintenance.
“With the way that digital tools are now unleashing quite a bit of power, whether they're AI-driven or not, there's a lot of opportunity to really create these career pathways, these learning pathways with positions in mind, or even people in mind. And at the end of the day, that ties out to the objectives of the organization, ties out to the specific skills that somebody might need in order to support what's happening at a plant level or at an organizational level.”
Laboring Over the State of Labor
Finding and keeping labor is a real challenge for food manufacturers, a challenge that has to be managed on top of everything else taking place inside a plant.
“There's been a lack of emphasis in the United States around these types of jobs. Maybe they haven't necessarily been the most attractive jobs in people's minds. And that kind of goes back, I think, into the broader manufacturing discussion around maybe dirty, dangerous jobs,” Nathan explained.
Regardless of the kind of work being done, people want to believe that there is a career path for them, that there is an opportunity to get promoted and increase their skills and earnings. If food safety is dependent on producers being able to build a stable, well-trained workforce, addressing turnover and investing in current employees is a direct investment in safety.
Increasing awareness about the amount of leading automation in food manufacturing plants could go a long way towards challenging perceptions that working in the industry is “old school.”
“I think people forget, food manufacturing and manufacturing is technology. It's a technology-driven industry. And I think people think of technology in this day and age as software, right?” Nathan speculated.
“That's certainly part of it but there's these really, really cool machines. There's these cool processes that have to be put in place and people have to work and understand these skills and these technical components of the job that are technology in order to do well. So, again, if you think about the dynamics of what's going on in the world of maintenance, you talk to any manufacturer, food manufacturer, they're struggling to find people who've got experience in maintenance.”
Understanding the Why
Whether it is cutting edge software, innovative machinery, or food safety protocols, a lot of information has to be available to employees for them to be safe and successful.
I asked Nathan what types of information have to be available for this to be the case.
“Food employees have to know how their role supports food safety in the first place,” he told me. “They have to know it well enough to field questions from inspectors that might be conducting line interviews while they're there visiting the facility for audit purposes. They need to know about general personal hygiene as well as just good manufacturing practices.”
Each task or role will have its own safety requirements: packaging, cooking, sorting, etc. Knowing what has to be done and why are equally important for employees to apply a strict set of guidelines to a variable range of products.
“Understanding the why is really important, and we certainly include that in skills-focused modules and machine-specific content,” Nathan explained. “Organizations really have to lean on their food safety culture to build that environment.”
Knowing what will happen if they don’t carry out their role correctly, what it will do to the product and consumers, provides a clear incentive to stay safe. Building that food safety culture, keeping it visible internally, and ensuring that employees feel empowered to act when something is not right, create a culture of accountability - and hopefully continuous improvement as well.
