Supervisors – Unsung Heroes
Welcome to Food Bites, your weekly food safety fix!
This week we’ve decided to pay tribute to the humble Supervisor…
The true value of Supervisors is underestimated especially when we consider that these are the individuals who are required to lead their teams and motivate them to follow specific food safety practices and rules.
Of course, there is a lot of focus on training staff and providing awareness to senior management, but the Supervisor is usually last in line, if ever at all. Very often these unsung heroes are armed with nothing more than mandatory basic food safety training and a job title piled high with responsibility and accountability they are not really equipped for.
Organisations often promote their best Operators to Supervisors without equipping them with the new set of skills that are required as a Supervisor. These new skills would typically include communication, conflict resolution, leadership, critical thinking, interpersonal skills, time and priority management, problem solving, amongst others. Supervisors are uniquely positioned to influence people and teams and organisations are only as strong as the weakest link. Supervisors with only strong technical skills and little human skills will not be able to influence those around them in a positive manner.
The key role of a supervisor includes:
- Educating staff to perform tasks and supervising that they are performed correctly
- Supporting staff to be the best they can be – very often supervisors take on a coach or mentoring role
- Coaching and encouraging staff to follow best practice by leading by example
- Engaging, empowering, and counselling to drive performance – sometimes the Supervisor is the best motivator!
Investing in food safety training that focuses on the role of the Supervisor will give you a confident, independent individual which will improve the dynamic between production teams and ensure interaction with others allowing everybody to make the right decisions when it really matters!
A trained and competent Supervisor will give you the peace of mind that everything is under control (even on the night shift) and if you think nobody is watching, the Supervisor is ALWAYS watching.
Progress Excellence offers various Supervisor/Team Leader workshops which focus on equipping these individuals with the specific competencies to help your Supervisor be the best they can be! Visit our website [https://progress-excellence.co.za/food-safety-management/ ] for more information about these training programmes or reach out to us at info@progress-excellence.co.za for a custom quotation.
Curious about our next newsletter? Next week we will be taking a deep-dive into root cause analysis and how, if applied correctly, can help you solve problems; PERMANENTLY.
Food Bite greetings!