Mark This! Podcast, Episode 1, Safety Matters
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Todd Gardner, Vice President of Safety and Risk Control & Lara Malatesta, Vice President of Food Safety and Management Systems
It's time to Mark This, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
Today on Mark This, we are exploring Aramark's safety culture, the backbone of a company that delivers ultimate hospitality to millions of people every day. Safety is not a reactionary process consisting only of a team or procedures to be deployed when things go wrong; it is truly a constant heartbeat and a mindset within the company culture with which to conduct business, anticipate and prevent issues before they occur, and to improve functions in ever-evolving partnerships. Todd Gardner, Vice President of Safety and Risk Control, and Lara Malatesta, Vice President of Food Safety and Management Systems, are joining us today to talk about—you guessed it—safety and hospitality and culture and why our safety team members are tireless champions for our company, field teams, and temperature logs. Lara, tell us a bit about yourself and why you chose safety as your career path.
Lara Malatesta (01:32):
I really didn't expect to be in the safety business, to be honest with you, and I actually grew up in hospitality. My parents ran an inn in North Central Pennsylvania for 43 years. They just retired. Like most kids, my parents wanted me to take over the business, but I wanted to go in a completely opposite direction, and so I studied environmental compliance and protection and worked many years supporting high-hazard industries like utility and manufacturing industries, and in those industries, you learn people safety along the way.
About 15 years ago, I found myself back in hospitality, working at Aramark, and I feel really fortunate because in this role, I've been able to not only work in injury prevention, supporting the legacy business, dining business, and refreshments, but I got to use my environmental background and leisure and facilities, and now I'm in food safety supporting the team supporting all the businesses. So I just feel really fortunate that my hospitality beginning brought me into safety and I'm doing meaningful work every day.
Todd, your turn. Can you introduce yourself and let us know how safety and hospitality are interconnected?
Sure. Thanks, Heather. It's funny, my journey into safety and hospitality kind of mirrors Lara's, rather. I grew up in hospitality. I started working as a kid as a busboy, worked in restaurants all through high school and college, ended up being a manager at a very large major pizza delivery chain, and then left hospitality, kind of pursued some other interests and got involved in sales and technology and consulting and outsourcing.
In a roundabout way about 15 years ago, I joined Aramark, spent about five years as a district manager became what we call a "regional safety leader," and that's really important, I'll talk about that in a minute. But for the last 10 years I have been with the safety team, so as you ask about that connection between hospitality and safety, it was as a regional safety leader that the connection between hospital and safety was really driven home for me.
If you look at the root of what hospitality is, if you go back, right, it predates modern times, it's about taking care of the stranger. It's about providing food and rest and drink and comfort to the stranger, so as a DM, you spend a lot of time working with your employees, working with your staff, and it was during that time that I realized that there's a connection here that if you can't keep your people safe, if you can't keep your consumers safe, it's kind of impossible to provide a superior hospitality experience, so for me, it all comes down to, do we care? Do we care enough, right? Do we care for our guests, our communities, our employees? Are we doing the right things, both as individuals, but also as a company to provide the things people need, the training, the tools, the resources, the experiences that demonstrate that we genuinely care?
To that end, Todd, let's explore that big question: Why should we care what a company's safety culture is?
Todd Gardner (04:47):
Hmm, yeah. When you think about a safety culture, a safety culture is a foundational aspect of really any company's culture, right? You'll hear from many companies that our employees are our greatest asset, you'll hear that safety is the top priority. When you hear those things, you can really look at an organization and evaluate, "Hey, is this an organization based on their safety culture, the things they say they're going to do, is this an organization I want to interact with? Would I want to be a patron of that restaurant. Would I want to work there? Would I want my kids to work there?"
But when you peel back beyond those kind of feel-good statements that you hear about top priority, what's key about the safety cultures, are you actually doing the things you're say, you say you're going to do? Are you living up to those commitments to your employees, to your guests, to the communities you serve, right, by your actions? When you really want to evaluate a safety culture in a company, why you should really care, is do the things happen that are supposed to happen when no one's looking? When you're not being monitored, when you're not being forced to track a compliance activity, do managers do employees stop and take the time to ensure that we're doing things the right way every time without having to be told to do it?
When you think about what is a good safety culture, again, I'll come back to the word "caring," do you care about your employees, right? It goes beyond the employees and goes to your consumers. I think some of the work that I've done with Lara and her team—let's take allergens, for example—we work in environments where people are coming to eat, and in today's environment, a lot of that is grab and go. They don't interact with us and they show up with food intolerances or food allergens, that could put them in the hospital if we feed them the wrong thing, so do we care enough to take that extra step, to engage those guests in ways that are meaningful to them that protect them, keep them safe? Again, as a consumer, if you think about a company with a good safety culture, it can drive you to decide where you want to eat, decide where you want to work, decide where you take your kids or your family there. I think, again, you can't separate safety culture from a company's culture from care.
Excellent. Lara, what makes us different from other companies when it comes to this safety culture? How do we do things differently?
Lara Malatesta (07:20):
Yeah, Todd did a really nice job of outlying what our safety culture's about, and I think what I'll build on is that I truly believe that the authenticity of our approach is our differentiator. We truly care about not only the employee's safety, but also their well-being, their mental wellness, and I really think the best way that we probably demonstrate that is in our safe policy, which is really the foundation of everything that we do in this organization. We took a lot of time and care to be really clear on what our guiding principles are. When we say we're a safe organization. In the policy, you'll see that we talk about educating and engaging employees. We talk about always learning and growing as not only people, but also as managers and leaders of the organization. We talk about doing the right thing and having a high-level integrity.
In our team, along with our partners that support these principles, we take this into account. We develop the tools that we provide to our frontline and our managers, and so you talk about authenticity, it's helping to tell the why things are important, it's helping to make things personal and connect with the individual, and making sure that everything that we put out there is easily accessible to the people we're trying to get to. So I really believe that when you lead with genuine care for others, for their safety, for the protection of the environment, others see that value, and they're empowered to join in, and support us in the safety culture we're building.
Lara, those are great points. When I listen to your answers there, I like to think about the way we had to change our business, literally transform our business over the last several years in response to the pandemic, right? While we all did a lot of work to create new rules and policies, our operators had to in the moment address customers issues and consumers issues around sanitation, hygiene, social distancing, mask-wearing.
Again, going back to that culture of caring, it was amazing to watch our organization just transform every aspect of our business, from what we prepared, how we prepared it, how we served it, how we interacted with consumers, and I think that's a great mark of just when it comes to that culture, they didn't need us to tell them that, they needed guidance and help on how to do it, but not whether or not it needed to be done. When I think about in the middle of all this, as the pandemic's going on, the work we've done around just making sure that every employee is provided a new pair of shoes every year, right? The hospitality industry, slips and falls are still the number one cause of workplace injuries, and in the midst of the pandemic, the organization made a decision that, hey, if we really care, we have to continue to demonstrate that care and provided shoes again for every single employee across all of our businesses. I think that's a great example of really what that culture looks like and how it's different here at Aramark.
Heather Dotchel (10:43):
I love that example. One of the things that comes across as I listen to both of you speak is this concept that everybody in the company is included in our safety measures and our safety culture. But I know it also gets much more specific than that. Lara, can you talk a little bit about how we explicitly think of inclusion and sustainability in our safety efforts.
Lara Malatesta (11:12):
Yeah, sure. This is one of the things that I'm most proud about saying that I worked for Aramark is having the ability to contribute to our enterprise sustainability plan, known as Be Well Do Well, which also is an inclusive of our equity and inclusion efforts. When you think about sustainability, what it means to us and what Aramark's been doing a long time, it is making a positive impact on people in the environment. Obviously, the work that we do on the safety front, along with our operational partners is a key component of that. We do this through our commitment of, we've talked a lot about engaging employees, but the other piece of that is enabling healthy consumers and supporting communities. We talked about engaging employees. Putting our employees in slip-resistant shoes is one way that we do that.
Todd mentioned that he got the safety bug as a regional safety leader. We have a safety leader program that hundreds of our managers and leaders in the organization have gone through and they've served in this function. Every year, we celebrate World Safety and Health Day across the globe holding events, just celebrating the work that we've done. This is a great way that we engage employees and contribute to our sustainability plan. When we talk about healthy consumers, I mean the work that we do through the food safety standards we have established, the training of our managers, or the allergen-safe offerings that we provide that was referenced earlier. That's just a really important piece. Not only are we training our own people, but we're conveying that to our consumers and the communities that we serve.
Then again, supporting communities. We can't forget that another main function of our safety team and our safe platform is environmental safety. We have environmental experts on our team that support our whole operations, but specifically our government clients who service stewards of public lands that we all enjoy in our free time. I think all these efforts that we support in the area of people, food, and environmental safety are really our core to our Be Well Do Well plan. As I started off this segment, I'm just proud and honored personally to be able to contribute to such a worthwhile cause.
I appreciate everything that you've said so far, Lara and Todd, about our proactive safety culture at Aramark. But I do want to turn the corner a little bit because part of what you do is respond to situations where something goes wrong, and that response is really important in establishing who we are as a company when that happens. When something does go wrong, Todd, how quickly do we respond, and how do we fix it?
Heather, it's a great question. I think first and foremost, the thing that we do first is make sure everybody's okay. Are employees safe? Are consumers safe? Are guests safe? That's always the top of the list. Before we get into what we do to fix it, I think it's really important that from a cultural standpoint, we take the approach where we want to make sure we're not assigning blame, right, that we're looking at, hey, what could we at headquarters have done differently to prevent that specific injury or consumer event from happening? What could be done differently in the line of business, or at the location that would prevent that from happening again? So, the first step is certainly check to make sure everybody's safe, but then it's really an introspective conversation to say, "What did we do wrong? Right, how could we be better?"
Once you go through that, we obviously conduct an investigation, any consumer reported incident or a workplace injury, an investigation's completed within 24 hours, right, so we log what happened, why it happened, how it happened, really driving towards root cause, so we can really get under the covers to make sure we're not just addressing symptoms, right?
Then lastly, it's about implementing good corrective actions. Sometimes that can be as simple as changing a process, a subtle shift and a process, do this first, then that could prevent an injury. Often it includes training. Often it includes really rethinking what happened and how we could approach it differently, and many times, like with our shoe program said, "Hey, look, we know that we have to improve our personal protective equipment. We have to improve what we're providing to our employees so they can do their job safely and get through their day and go home the same way they showed up for that shift."
Heather and Todd, one thing that I would add, too, is remember, we're a people business, people, we're humans, we're going to make mistakes, right? I think a really good marker of a mature safety culture is the response that Todd talked about and then how we react not only in the short term, but also the long term. In Aramark, we engage the leadership in that response. We take a look to say, "How can we prevent this from happening again and make these programmatic process changes that are needed?"
Then the other thing the safety team along with our partners and our stakeholders will do is we'll take a look back and we'll look at the trending. We'll look at what happened in the year and we will look for ways to continuously improve our program. What do we need to add? What do we need to change? We pay a lot of attention to the look back in always challenging ourselves on how we can get better.
Lara, that's a great point, and I think it's important to call out, too, that we've designed a safety management system that provides us a significant amount of data about all of our events, right, so we have the luxury of having all this data now, going back, I don't know, Lara, 15 years, right, so we continuously review and analyze results, right, in an effort to figure out, "Hey, where are the gaps in our programs and our processes and our trainings that we need to focus on?" Just even just from a continuous improvement point of view, but really with an eye on, how are we reducing workplace injuries? How are we reducing foodborne illness events, or allergen events, or fill in the blank.
Then what I'm hearing from you, Todd, with all of our response is that when something happens, we respond quickly, we respond thoroughly, but we always prefer to prevent. Lara, can you share preventative initiatives within the company and how those make that kind of difference?
Yeah. How much time do we have? I mean, which one do I choose? But I will tell you I have a favorite, so I would say hands down our most successful and proven preventative initiative is our safe brief process. What's a safe brief? It's a one-pager: it's a simple, easy way that managers teach our employees and ensure understanding of safe practices and behaviors related to people, food, and environmental safety. We ask the managers to review these safe briefs during their pre-shift huddles. It covers a weekly topic that's divided in daily safety activities.
What I love about it, it's a true engagement play. It's about the manager engaging the employees, including them in the safety discussion, including them and talking about the hazards that they may see in their daily job, and what some corrective actions could be, or some solutions could be. It reinforces shared ownership of safety because safety doesn't belong to the safety team, it belongs to all of us, right, and it just creates this really awesome forum for sharing. This process has been in place for nearly 10 years, I think. I'm pretty certain that Todd and I were both on the team when this was designed and I really couldn't be more proud of the success of this process. It's been a model for frontline education and engagement in Aramark and I know it's going to continue for another decade or more.
Awesome. I think sharing is key. As we bring this episode to an end, I actually want to throw this back to Todd because sharing is caring in Aramark and one thing that we do with every meeting is begin with a safety moment, so let's flip the script on that a little bit and take us out with a safety moment. Todd, you have one to share?
Sure, Heather. Thanks. I think it's important to just talk about safety moments for a minute, right? We ask everyone in the organization to begin any meeting with a safety moment. By the way, sharing top secret information here, it's not really important what the topic is, right? Sure, we can make it relevant to what's happening at the workplace, we can make it relevant to what's happening in society, in our environment, whatever, but when you talk about establishing a culture, a lot of time, it's establishing those routines, it's establishing the practices that demonstrate to others that safety is important to us, so every meeting we have we start with a safety moment, so I'll leave you with a safety moment that's relevant to the hospitality industry and talks to some of our experiences around workplace injuries, so we'll do a safety moment on slips, trips, and falls.
Really important in any workplace, but certainly in the hospitality industry to be aware of the hazards that could lead to a slip trip and fall, so we think about if you work in a kitchen or front of house, right, dirty floors, grease on the floor, trash on the floor, trip hazards, right, hoses, brooms, whatever, really important to be aware that there are conditions in your environment that could lead to a slip and fall, that could lead to a permanent injury, so we talk about conditions. We also talk about behaviors, right? Hey, are we taking proactive steps to clean up those conditions? Are we making sure our floors are clean, our brooms and mops are put away, that the floor is free of trip hazards, right, and that we're clearly communicating to all of our associates about those trip hazards?
Last safety moment, it's about our personal behavior, right? I know that there's a lot of germophobes in the world, and nobody really likes to use a handrail, but when you're walking up and down stairs, using a handrail is the most effective way to prevent a slip and fall on the stairs. Additionally, I think we've probably all seen the videos on the internet of people looking at their phones while they're walking and walking into an object, a person walking into traffic, right? Serious safety hazard of not keeping your eyes on your path and not being aware of your surroundings, so safety moment for today is be aware of those slip, trip, and fall issues. By the way, proper footwear is another example, as we talked about our shoe program, but that's a safety moment for today. Stay safe, use the handrail, be aware of the conditions around you, and you don't have a slip and fall.
Our safety team loves to share their philosophy and culture and call out certain people named Heather for cell phones and handrails, but you can visit aramark.com's newsroom for more information and highlighted accomplishments of our safety team. I'd like to offer a huge thank you to our guests today, Todd Gardner and Lara Malatesta, and I'd like to thank our listeners for tuning into Mark This.
