Prepare Your Team
Motivated, Educated, Engaged
make it "pop"
To promote a strong, positive food safety culture throughout your organization, all employees—from frontline to senior leaders—must be motivated, educated, and engaged. One way to keep your team engaged is to connect to your diverse teams through popular culture.
Popular culture, sometimes called “mass culture” or “pop culture,” is a set of practices, beliefs, and artistic outputs (movies, songs, books) that are found commonly throughout a society. For example, you may never have chosen to listen to a song by Taylor Swift or Beyonce, but you still probably know who they are and a little bit about them. Their artistic output—their music—is part of popular culture.
You may recognize the gif on this page as one of the most famous comedy television scenes of all time and an excellent example of the food industry portrayed humorously in popular culture. Even if you do not recognize the scene, imagine what conversations you could spark about food safety based on this short clip.
What topics could you discuss with your teams using this gif? What recognizable shows, movies, or other media could you use to start more conversations about food safety?
Popular culture references to food preparation, crisis management, and workplace safety are abundant. Many shows, movies, and memes provide opportunities to discuss important concepts in a safe space. Because popular culture is not reality, and the situations are often silly and extreme, teams can avoid the stress and tension of real-world situations. Instead of calling out specific coworkers or issues in a facility, teams can discuss characters and stories as a pathway to greater conversations about procedures and safety.
important considerations
If you wish to include popular culture to supplement or enhance your existing food safety engagement techniques, consider the following:
Relevance- Will this example be relatable to my target audience and the topic?
Accuracy- Is this reference showing food safety moments aligned with best practices? And if not, is it clear to the audience that the scene is demonstrating exaggerated or unsafe practices for humor or drama?
Contextualization- What additional context and/or explanations will I need to provide to clarify what is depicted and how it relates to our organization?
Diversity- How can I incorporate a range of references to cater to diverse audiences and promote inclusivity?
Cultural Sensitivity- Does the reference include elements which could alienate, confuse, or insult any members of my target audience?
The use of popular culture may not work for all organizations or for all teams within an organization. Individual teams and facilities have different subcultures based on the ages, races, and backgrounds represented.
The goal of popular culture as an engagement tool is to engage: if the reference alienates team members or muddies the waters of best practices, consider exploring other tools.
