Behavior Change and Training

With thousands of employees working in hundreds of foodservice outlets—from street vending carts and quick service restaurants to full-service dining halls serving group banquets and convention dinners—the real magic of Walt Disney World’s approach to food safety is its behavior-based food safety management system.

Walt Disney World’s director of safety and health, Frank Yiannas, explained how the company’s behavior-based approach to food safety has a big impact on reducing risk. “When I think about the FDA risk factors, or the contributing factors of foodborne disease today in retail/foodservice establishments, whether they be time/temperature processes, personal hygiene or contamination, I often think of human behavior. The first step to assessing the FDA risk factors is coming to the realization that often these issues are, in some form, related to human behavior,” he says.

“In order to make improvements, we need to recognize more than just the food science,” continues Yiannis. “I believe that you won’t be successful in addressing the FDA risk factors until you realize that it’s the food science and the behavioral science—by combining these we can create a behavior-based food safety management system.” Monitoring performance, positive feedback, training and awards and incentives are all key factors in Walt Disney World’s system.

Employees need to know what you expect them to do, he says. Training has to be hands-on, showing staff exactly what it is that you want them to do and how to do it, and then overseeing what they are doing and showing them how to do it correctly. The operation’s ability to reduce food safety risk factors begins with making sure that food safety expectations are crystal clear.

But making the food safety mission personal to employeess is one powerful way that the company promotes positive behavior change to reduce risk factors and protect public health. This means making a commitment to educating personnel about the why’s of food safety rather than just addressing the what’s and how’s via on-the-job training. “When you bring employees into a classroom and you talk about food safety, such as microorganisms in foods or the time/temperature process, you are really educating them, you’re not training them,” Yiannis says. “You’re telling them why food safety is important. One of the things you might want to do is use personal testimonies, true examples of foodborne disease and how it affected an individual and their family. I think that might be very persuasive in food safety education.”

The only way you’ll know whether your strategy for behavior change is working is to measure, advises Yiannis. “We’re believers in that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So create measurements. If you are trying to effect a certain behavior, I would ask you to go out and take a look at that behavior and actually measure it to see whether there is an increase or decrease in the behavior.” If activities are being done correctly, provide positive feedback; if not, provide coaching and feedback.

There is an emphasize on the importance of developing training and education programs for employees so that learning is a positive experience. Disney sent Glo-Germ kits to every site as a handwashing exercise, dispatched internal trainers to each location to conduct interactive demonstrations on risk-factor related strategies, and had  managers and employees form teams to brainstorm and develop fun, creative posters as visual reminders of food safety best practices. 

Says Yiannis, “On the food safety end of it, we identified six or seven topics primarily based on risk factors—personal hygiene, employee health, temperature control, which we broke down into different categories (hot holding, cooking, cold holding), etc. We did that because in every employee’s job description [we include] the frequency for taking those measurements.