Creating a Culture of Safety in Your Restaurant

The most successful restaurants provide a consistent experience for guests, who expect quality service, quality food, and a fair price. These restaurants are regimented workplaces that thrive on routine and have multiple operating systems in place. While these well-developed systems drive financial success, restaurateurs sometimes overlook the importance of incorporating occupational safety into their existing daily checklists and operational procedures. That can have negative consequences for the business and the personal well-being of its employees.

Is my business unsafe?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent data shows 138 restaurant workers died on the job in 2017. Restaurants averaged 2.9 injuries per 100 employees in 2018, it reported.

EMPLOYERS Loss Control Program Manager Dan Killins said restaurants that are most successful at occupational safety and health incorporate it into their existing operating systems.

Safety begins with training

Within their operational systems, restaurant owners and managers ask themselves many times during a shift: Are we cooking things to the right temperature? Are we storing things correctly? Are we sourcing our ingredients from the right places? Incorporating occupational safety-related questions into that process can help them avoid the most common restaurant injuries, which include:

• Cuts from knife use, kitchen equipment and damaged tableware

• Burns from hot liquids, chemicals, plates, stoves, ovens or fryers

• Slips and falls due to wet or otherwise slippery floors

• Strains from lifting and carrying heavy objects

These injuries can leave a restaurant short-staffed, costing the owner time and money for medical exams and treatments. This adds unwanted, unexpected and unnecessary costs to the bottom line of an already tough-to-run small business. Avoiding these preventable injuries begins with training.

As a restaurant owner or manager, when you train employees to do their specific jobs, also train them to do their jobs safely. For example, when training an employee to flip a burger correctly, it’s not just how to flip it well and quickly. It’s also teaching them to flip it away from their bodies so the grease doesn’t splash on them. Or when showing a line cook how to drain a basket of fries, teach them to use two hands to make sure they don’t strain their shoulders or arms. A restaurant safety element should be part of training for all tasks, including stocking the storerooms, retrieving or putting away ingredients, moving kegs or stocking a bar.

The pre-shift meeting is another chance to incorporate occupational safety training into a daily routine. Employees pay attention when managers present the daily specials, talk about the ingredients and allow them to taste. Front-of-house staff, who may not be privy to everything going on in the back-of-house, pay particular attention because it connects them to what’s going on in the restaurant. That’s a perfect opportunity to start using the language of restaurant safety, Killins said.

Routine vs. Non-Routine Tasks

Restaurants, like any business, have routine and non-routine tasks. Routine tasks tend to cause fewer injuries because employees are used to doing them often. Non-routine tasks are those that occur on only a monthly, quarterly, annual, or occasional basis. Because employees have less experience with non-routine tasks, they are more likely to result in an injury or accident.

As a restaurant owner or manager, you need to carefully evaluate the non-routine tasks and weigh the benefits of having an employee do the job versus hiring a specialist contractor.

Consider the non-routine task of cleaning the hood over a fryer or grill. Typically, restaurants will contract out that task because it can be high-risk. Hoods are elevated and messy, and the task involves chemical use and cleaning overhead. However, it’s tempting for restaurant owners or managers to take a shortcut to save a buck and just have a staffer do the job.

“Standing on a grill and trying to clean a hood or balancing between a ladder, a grill, and a fryer is a bad idea,” Killins said. “I have read incidents of people actually stepping in fryer oil while trying to clean the hood. While it might be easy to say, ‘Hey, after you’re done with the dishes guys, can you go and spend a couple of hours cleaning that?’ But restaurateurs really must evaluate if an employees has the tools, experience and understanding of the chemicals necessary to do a job like that, then balance that with that many companies out there who do that for a living and that’s their expertise.”

Make Safety Your Mantra

When employees hear the message of restaurant safety from their leaders on a frequent basis, it’s similar to the effect of a drip irrigation system for plants. Drenching plants at the beginning of a week, letting them dry out and then drenching them again a week later isn’t healthy for a plant. A constant slow drip from an irrigation system keeps the soil perfectly hydrated.