In Part 1 of our discussion on food safety audit forms we discussed the first four keys you must keep in mind: make questions clear and concise, build dynamic forms, make correct answers consistent, and ensure your scoring system is logical and available. Today, we’ll discuss how to present those questions on the audit form in a way that drives performance.
Along with my thoughts are insights shared by RizePoint Senior Applications Consultant Jeremy Thomas. He’s been with RizePoint since its inception and has been involved in almost every large-scale client implementation. He has a thorough knowledge of developing audit forms, scoring systems and the key audit components that drive positive change.
Best Practice #5: Pair Questions With Relevant Instructions
A big challenge for auditors is when they are given a food safety audit form that has a list of questions, but no audit instructions. For example, let’s say you have this question on your form: “Has the milkshake machine been properly cleaned?” If you don’t include the proper guidelines on how to accomplish this, then you are relying on the auditor’s memory, which does not lend itself to consistent evaluations. Even when something is standard in the FDA food code, you never want to rely on someone’s memory to get the job done right. You can avoid this pitfall by making sure that every question on your audit form is coupled with the necessary evaluation guidelines, taking guesswork out of the process.
“When auditors have questions about how to respond to a question, they need to have instant access to the standard that the question is trying to address,” said Thomas. “ The standard should have detailed information and supporting best practice examples and images to ensure that each question is being assessed correctly by a new auditor or a seasoned veteran.”
When it comes to any evaluation, keep in mind that the last thing the auditor wants is to frustrate a restaurant manager by spending unnecessary time conducting the evaluation. To mitigate this, the next two best practices will help auditors complete their evaluations as efficiently as possible.
Best Practice #6: Consider Workflow When Organizing Questions
When determining the order of the questions on your food safety audit form, it’s important to consider the logistics and workflow of the actual restaurant. Many companies will just start listing questions without considering that someone is actually going to have to walk around and answer them. The questions should flow the way the restaurant was built so auditors can complete the evaluation one section of the restaurant at a time.
“Organizing audit forms this way will help auditors be more efficient,” said Thomas. “If your auditors are going from the dining room, to the walk-in cooler, back to the dining room, to the cash register, and back to the dining room again, that’s a huge waste of everyone’s time.”
By taking the time to organize questions with the restaurant’s flow in mind, you’ll help auditors complete the evaluation as quickly as possible.
Best Practice #7: Keep the List of Questions Short and Relevant
It’s important to gauge the relevance of each item on your food safety audit form by asking yourself the following questions:
- Does this question track information that we need to drive performance?
- Does this question still apply to my restaurants?
Let’s talk about each of these points briefly.
Performance: Some companies fall into the trap of using a food safety audit form to track everything under the sun, including information that’s simply not critical to food safety, like gum under the tables or wobbly tables in the dining area. While it would be nice to check on these things periodically, these questions water down your food safety audit form by not focusing on essential information. Instead of just capturing data to capture data, make your questions help you drive change and improve food safety.
Relevance: I’ve seen many food safety audit forms where up to 20 percent of the questions were completely irrelevant to the restaurant concept. For example I’ve worked with a company that had five questions on their food safety audit form related to the ice cream machine. When I asked them why ice cream wasn’t on their menu, they informed me that they no longer served ice cream and hadn’t in five years. Non-applicable questions like these irritate auditors because they have to try to remember to skip them. This scenario makes new auditor training difficult because they’re asking themselves, “What does this mean? Why is it asking about ice cream? Should I be looking for ice cream?” You can see why it is important to remove any outdated or non-applicable questions.
When I asked the vice president of operations why they hadn’t updated the form in the last five years, they said it was too costly and time consuming to update the paper form and then email everyone about the change. An automated, mobile auditing solution like RizePoint would have eliminated that problem. The program administrator could have easily deleted the questions that pertained to ice cream, making their form shorter and more relevant.
Once you have chosen the questions that best gauge performance and are the most relevant to the current state of your business, Thomas recommended highlighting the most critical questions to let auditors know to pay particular attention to them when performing evaluations.
Best Practice #8: Use an Automated Platform
Businesses are constantly changing and evolving. Food safety audit forms need to reflect those changes. Unfortunately, people let the cost and inconvenience of updating paper forms keep them from making critical changes. They continue using paper forms and Excel spreadsheets for the evaluations, and then following up with email to keep everyone in the loop about policy changes. This system is inefficient and makes it difficult to implement any of these best practices I’ve discussed.
Mobile auditing platforms like RizePoint’s populate the form with either the FDA food code or the policies from the client. The client has access at the corporate level to change policies at any time, which are instantly synced across the entire enterprise. Automated forms enable you to increase auditor consistency, track real time data, perform corrective action, and ensure each store receives a quality evaluation.
These eight best practices will enable any company to improve the efficiency and efficacy of their audit forms