Often, it seems that many of us have a habit of thinking of every event, day, month, and quarter as a pass-or-fail situation. We get the importance of understanding history to avoid repeating it―but are we missing the opportunity to build pride in a time of post-pandemic global cultural change and amongst generational culture changes?
Do these habits support employees being more open to high functionality in a deeply ingrained quality culture, or do we spend too much time marinating in the negativity, causing us to be slower to shake off failures? Does it make us less likely to take risks unless previous ones turned out to be wins? These are the themes and cues that I focus on and listen for when I talk to any of our approximately 270 employees who hold quality roles within Ingredion North America.
In 2022, Ingredion started on a global journey to understand and optimize our culture of quality. The goal? To make Ingredion a world-class leader in innovation, value creation, quality excellence and product safety. We’re implementing our Ingredion Performance System (IPS) focused on process standardization and, within it, working to stand up a quality pillar in all our manufacturing sites. We’re surveying our approximately 12,000 employees across 27 countries annually on the culture of quality. Every day, we are dedicated to taking this feedback and optimizing global alignment.
Building pride in the quality of our approaches should be a basic building block to building a culture of quality
We know that product quality is crucial to our 18,000 customers in 120 countries and that meeting those needs is why we’re all employed. We also recognize the need to dive deeper into how employees feel about the quality of their work and how they feel about their roles because when team members feel connected, like they belong and are contributing to something bigger than themselves, we get the best of their effort and their thinking.
Two thousand twenty-four audits against V6.0 of the FSSC GFSI standard include a new requirement for food safety and quality cultures designed to address this. The food and beverage industry will now start to dig into these issues and, perhaps, create better work environments that can help lead to better outcomes―for employee health and wellness, which can help maximize performance.
As food safety and quality professionals, many of us have historically employed the tactic of ‘bringing a message home’ to employees, like teaching about the dangers of foreign material by sharing stories and showing pictures of children eating ice cream or families sharing a meal. We quote statistics of food-borne illnesses and ask team members to raise their hands if they or immediate family members have food allergies. These tactics effectively get people to pay attention and internalize what not to do and why it matters, and to help encourage the ‘See something, say something’ mentality, which benefits our team members and our customers.
In my 30 years of food industry experience, I’ve learned that providing positive reinforcement and uplifting people is never a bad investment. Building pride in the quality of our approaches should be a basic building block to building a culture of quality. We need to remind each other of this each day, and leaders must set an example. Let’s move to the habit of providing enough positive and constructive feedback daily so that we continue to think about how we win in the marketplace and how we win with our teams.
