1, How to Guarantee & Track Hygiene?
Your customers need you more than ever today. As businesses grind to a halt and getting groceries seems like a drill you have become a lifeline for your customers. We are helping some of the largest brands in the world keep operating at high levels through this crisis. The best companies today monitor their employees’ health very closely and err on the side of caution at the first sign of risk. That keeps them safe. What keeps them operational is their agility in taking corrective actions to ensure hygiene and fast, skillful redeployment of their team.
In our #RealHero series of posts, we are sharing some best practices that can keep your employees safe even as you continue to serve a crisis hit customer base living through isolation and stress of a type never seen before.
SoP to Muscle Memory
You can use WHO’s guidelines to ensure safe operation, or you can improve on them. Considering the lack of time your team and managers need to have quick easy access to current operating guidelines for safety. Incorporate tollgates and self-audits wherever possible. The sooner your guidelines become muscle memory for your staff the faster you’ll operate while staying safe.
Guidelines need to cover hourly and daily processes, kitchen shut-downs and re-opening. Different issues will probably trigger different contingencies. Kitchen managers will be under pressure and an application that guides them accurately goes a long way in enabling safety even as you cater to high business volumes while shorthanded.
A Hundred Eyes & Hands
Safety guidelines need to be strictly enforced and corrective measures need to be swiftly deployed. Your crisis management team is bound to be overloaded. They need to keep an eye on operations across the board even as they deal with the latest problem. This is where audits, intelligent escalations, and data-flow automation can save the day.
Seeing it All
When it comes to safety you have virtually no margin for error. Misreporting could cost lives. Self-audits with evidence attached are a great way to track your team’s adherence to safety guidelines. These can be augmented by regular audits by a separate team. A central team can quickly validate audit scores against the evidence. Our customers conduct thousands of audits across hundreds of kitchens every day. Audit creation can be manual or automated as per business rules.
(Our customers launched a comprehensive audit application in 2 days flat.)
Knowledge to Action
Information is worth nothing if it isn’t acted on. Actions in the form of corrective measures are dictated by the area of failure. Here are some of the things our customers are doing:
- Put in plans for all contingencies and identify the stakeholders responsible for each action in a plan. For example, a shortage of hand sanitizer needs to trigger emergency delivery of hand sanitizer followed by cleaning of all surfaces that may have been touched
- Inform each stakeholder of the required action within minutes to seconds of issue identification
- Review repeat failures in greater detail
- Collaborate around specific issues, avoid confusion
- Escalate to senior management within minutes if necessary
- Ensure crisis managers and senior managers have enough visibility across all operations to manage the logistics of any corrective actions
(Our customers use audit scoring, smart workflows, and omnichannel escalations to ensure nothing gets missed.)
We plan to cover the following topics in subsequent posts:
- The dynamics of auditing at scale
- Best practices in corrective actions
- Tracking employee health
- Rotating employees
- Managing up-time when short-handed
The pandemic is not going away overnight, regardless of what some individuals may seem to believe. Information is the most powerful weapon in our repertoire, so make sure you are completely aware of the risks involved and reasonable precautions to take. As the WEF has pointed out, a plausible worst-case scenario for the current situation can potentially bring the global economy to a virtual standstill. The time to act is now!
The business world is more technologically equipped to deal with a contingent situation today than ever before. Guidelines that empower the business community to fight back are easily accessible. Automation tools that can extend the right kind of support to Business leaders in this fight are viable. Prompt action can help protect your employees and your business. With proper preparation, planning & execution, Emergency Response, Employee Safety & Business Continuity can be practically automated within a matter of days. To discuss how Zvolv can help your business, click here.
