Why Don’t They Pay Attention to You?

Food safety trainers and food plant supervisors in Latin America are facing a new challenge with generational changes. Their audiences do not respond to verbal communication or instructions as in the past. As a result, seminar attendance tends to decrease and young participants display a growing air of indolence during training courses, that is portrayed by a lack of participation, bored faces, rampant use of electronic devices, etc.

Several factors contribute to this new behavior pattern.

1. Outdated training methods. Many trainers have not challenged their training techniques and are still using obsolete styles: endless monologues, overburdened PowerPoint presentations, too much theory and too few concrete tools, and lack of specific applicable examples.
    
2. Change in the student profiles. Young workers and professionals have different values, expectations, and learning styles than older generations. They are expert consumers of information, filter and process data quickly, and have short attention spans. If they do not concretely relate the topic to their duties, you will quickly lose their attention.
    
3. Demand for in-plant courses to the detriment of public seminars. As a consequence of the previous point, students are no longer satisfied with only a bunch of excellent, but general, information. They need specific and practical tools directly applicable to their workplaces and to their companies. This is why they prefer in-plant workshops to classroom lectures.

What differentiates older and younger trainees?
As a general rule, students born before the era of computers are usually grateful for the opportunity to attend a seminar and normally try to learn as much as possible and make a concerted effort to stay in their seats as long as possible to take maximum advantage of the training.

Many students born after the 80s have been spoiled with technology, which has made research easier and more fun. There is no longer a need to go to a library for endless research or to pay for a book or an expensive seminar. One click is all it takes to download the most current information or entertaining material. They do not need as much information presented to them, since they can find it easily on their own. When this generation attends a training session, they expect to receive something that is not downloadable from the Internet.

The generational differences impact the communication style and how they interact in a classroom with trainers and other students. Those who like networking need to be connected with several people at the same time. Have you noticed the number of students who use their smart phones during a seminar? For older generations, this is considered disrespectful, but today it is a normal behavior and the symptom of a cultural change.

How do we deal with this?
Make your training session attractive.One way to adapt training sessions to today’s students is to use interactive material and engaging teaching techniques.
 

Generate expectations as you introduce each topic. Provoke, impact, challenge! If your presentation is not compelling from the beginning, you will not hold your students’ attention. If the headline for a magazine article is not enticing, people will not read the article. Which headline sounds more appealing?

• Why don’t they pay attention to you?
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• Examples of teaching techniques to improve your training sessions.

Customize the presentation directly to students’ needs. You may not know your students’ needs ahead of time, but, when asking students to introduce themselves in a public seminar, ask them, “What are your expectations for this training?” or “What do you hope to learn?” This helps you adjust the time allotted to each section and the flow of information directly toward needs. Then you are able to give more time or detail to topics that interest the students.
 

Keep up the pace, and keep topics to the point. Sometimes we put so much emphasis on detail that students lose track of the underlying concept being taught. Many students quickly pick up information. For those people, as long as you are presenting the material clearly, you can almost never go too fast.

However, there are often groups with a mix of young and older students. It is uncommon for members of the group to express their displeasure if you are going too slow or too fast. It is up to you to decipher face and body language and use other techniques to keep you aware of the group’s involvement.

Asking the group “Do you need more examples?” can help you gauge understanding. If you want to keep the group engaged, lectures should never last more than 45 minutes without a break to get a drink, stretch, check voicemail or e-mail, etc.
 

Keep the group interested. Give as many audience-relevant examples as possible. Information must apply directly to them or you will lose them. A good idea is to have all participants introduce themselves in the beginning. As they do, write down the positions, processes, and products represented in the audience, and take a look at that guide from time to time in order to focus on them.

For example, when teaching HACCP Principles 2 through 7, ask participants to mention their own potential CCPs, according to the definition introduced in the class. Write them on a board, then use them as the platform for examples on CCP determination, definition of critical limits, monitoring activities, etc.
 

Keep the group interacting. Make the participants interact during workshops, discussions, and debates. Instead of providing a theoretical definition when teaching the non-negotiability of food safety or the concept of corrective actions, let the class work together in small groups of four or five, to determine what they would do in the following self-inspection situations:

1. You observe a roof leak over a product zone.
2. You find no soap in the dispensers at the hand-washing station in the process area.
3. There is a bird nest in the primary packaging warehouse.
4. You do not find any cleaning/sanitizing record after maintenance was performed on a food contact surface one day before.

Think about the potential outcomes of that exercise:

• It puts participants in simple, potentially very costly, situations that they have probably been through before. It mixes concepts of immediate and long-term corrective actions, but in relation with the product. It involves risk analysis, science-based decision making, and financial and emotional aspects.
• It gives examples of negligence where product safety is at risk. Students are good at theoretically analyzing the root cause of an issue, but they often skip the most important step of the immediate corrective actions. Was the product contaminated by the roof leakage, dirty hands, pathogens from bird droppings, maintenance tools, etc? Probably! The problem is that food companies often do not realize the potential risk posed by those failures and do not retain potentially affected product. If they do, they often release the lot based on a non-valid sampling and lab test.That simple exercise demonstrates to students how food safety is constantly “negotiated.”
• It helps them understand the main reason for recurrence of non-conforming situations. Since the affected product is not really taken care of, real failure costs associated with the situation are never calculated, making it a minor issue. Since minor issues are not costly, there is no priority for upper management to look for the root cause and to solve the issues. This explains why repetitive issues constantly appear in self-inspection reports.
• It is a good ice-breaking tool. It often generates passionate debates and guaranteed success in terms of engagement.
• It can be used as an excellent introductory exercise to create awareness and interest toward HACCP prerequisite programs. It conditions the student to realize the importance of preventive measures, monitoring, verification, and corrective actions.
• It may help prepare the field for a potential mock recall and crisis management.

Have fun. Life is stressful. You want participants to get out of their routines and forget their professional and personal problems for a moment. If not, you will not have the students’ full attention. Two tools that may be used include:

• If two trainers are available, a small sketch can create interest. In Latin America, we invented a character named Manolo. He is the typical fully trained, but poorly educated, employee who causes cross contamination or product adulteration. He does not understand food safety and asks the questions that others do not dare ask. The main trainer tries to give simple answers to Manolo to educate him.
• Trainingreshaped.com is a fun website about food safety learning, including short cartoons about food safety and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs).

Keep the group participating. Make participants teach short parts of the course. The best way to learn is to teach.This is a technique we use when presenting the requirements of a GFSI standard. Instead of having students read endless words in hundreds of slides and listen to a monotone monologue, we assign a requirement of the standard to a group of three or four people, then ask them to read it, summarize it, put the main idea on a board, then present it to the other groups of students. The trainer can add value to the team’s presentation with advice or examples.
 

Use visual aids. One schematic is worth 1000 words. Drawings, graphs, cartoons, etc. are easily remembered.

When teaching the integrated quality system, and the difference between quality, GMPs, and food safety, three circles may be very effective. (See Product Integrity at right.)

The green circle encompasses all the quality defects. Quality defects are, in general, visible and detectable by the customer or the consumer. They are not necessarily related to a legal requirement like GMPs and are often not hazardous, since they are easily detectable. They can be considered undesirable, but negotiable, issues that may lead to a customer complaint.

The yellow circle represents product adulteration, due to a GMP failure, e.g., negligence. These issues are, by nature, avoidable. They are not necessarily quality related (the adulteration may not be visible) and are not always hazardous. However the product would be in violation of the GMPs, thus considered unwholesome and illegal. At the same time, product adulteration may cause a quality defect (e.g., insect, mold, or hair) which explains why the yellow and green circles may cross each other. Many food safety hazards are due to negligence, like GMP failures (e.g., cross contamination with allergens or pathogens), or they enter both the yellow and red circles and sometimes the green one. Avoidable by definition, they must be prevented through prerequisite programs.

Other hazards are inherent to the product, raw materials, or process, and represent the lower part of the red circle, not yellow. They are determined by science and unavoidable by definition. Their control is by a process step (CCP), not a prerequisite program.

Asking students to give their own examples of product issues (defect, adulterants, and contaminants) and to locate them in the right portion of the three-circle graph helps them understand the difference between food quality, sanitation, and safety. At the same time, you can explain the focus of the hazard analysis, which is the red circle, and the difference of avoidable hazards (controllable through essential prerequisite programs) and inherent hazards (require process steps for their control).

The same graphic can be used to further explain the difference between the SQF levels 1 (yellow circle), 2 (yellow+red), and 3 (yellow+red+green) according to the scope.
 

Teaching concepts with analogies. Visual aids can be improved using comparison with daily life. One example that I often use to explain the underestimated importance of prerequisite programs (PRPs) compared to critical control points (CCPs) is the funnel and the sprinkler. (See CCP First, at right.)

The funnel is the CCP. There is no way to prevent inherent hazards from entering the process since they are unavoidable. This is why they require a process step (or several) for their control. The idea of the CCP is to make those hazards converge through one step (the funnel) from which they come out reduced to an acceptable level. The control of this step is generally simple and, in case of a failure, a known, easily retrievable portion of the potentially affected products can be stopped in a timely manner.

Essential prerequisite programs (those necessary to control hazards between the yellow and red circles) are like sprinklers. If the program is not properly controlled, it may allow several avoidable hazards to enter your process by negligence, spreading into different areas of the plant, and potentially affecting the product. Unfortunately, there may be no process step to eliminate those hazards, or the process steps may not be designed to absorb those multiplied hazards. So keep the sprinkler valve closed and do not let them enter.

For example, if the Supplier Control Program is not adequate, incoming materials may lead to several hazards in different areas and products. The task of determining how many products may have been contaminated, and from when, becomes nearly impossible.

Many interactive tools can be used to adapt the teaching methods to the audience. They make the trainer’s life easier and help attendees have a good time while learning useful tools that are applicable in their workplace.

The author is HACCP/IQS Trainer, AIB International.