Keeping Compliance Intact in a Covid-19 World

As we start to emerge from lock down, it’s time to do a health check on compliance. For the food industry, much of the focus during the Covid-19 pandemic, rightly has been on protecting our key workers and their families through the precautions of social distancing and enhanced hygiene in the workplace, whilst keeping the nation’s retailers stocked and the population fed.

Depleted resource levels through illness, self isolation, care responsibilities, furlough schemes and home working has left many compliance teams stretched to breaking point. In the current dynamic and fluid environment business leaders must make rapid decisions and implement immediate actions, pivoting with agility to keep food operations safe and economically viable. Its essential that the Technical has a strong voice throughout to ensure that change, food safety, regulatory compliance and due diligence remains uncompromised. Doing this well will help ensure continued business success. Any weakness sows the seeds for compromised quality, expensive regulatory failures, disappointed customers or worse: food safety breaches impacting on public health.

So it’s well worth putting in the resource and effort to have a properly coordinated approach, consulting both internally and externally, on the most effective Covid-19 compliance plan. Now is not the time to cut back Technical and Compliance teams. For you to consider:

• Review your governance structure, does your dashboard measure the right things and report frequently enough to pick up when key metrics are failing? Are reviews with strong actions to course correct still in place with the right cross functional team players to embed the needed processes and controls. Whilst some meetings can be reduced in frequency, those reviewing business compliance should not and can be done without everyone being in the same room, and the appropriate social distancing measures in place.
• Review your resource, be really clear and proactively decide on the elements of the quality management system which are essential and non essential. Putting the team on furlough might have seemed like a good cost saving measure but be sure to take a risk based approach to ensure the crucial elements still get done. In the short term the business may be able to cope if some tasks didn’t get completed as frequently, make sure you don’t pay for it in the longer term.
• Cultivate a positive and transparent relationship with your enforcement agencies. They are there to help you to compliance not catch you out and they can be a really useful source of advice. Better still if you haven’t already, get a Primary Authority relationship in place. They will be your critical friend and help you to get the best out of the fluid regulatory landscape.
• Make the most of internal audits, they really are an opportunity to stress test your systems. Its not enough to have them documented in a quality manual to provide a tick in a box come audit day. Ask the question – what is the purpose of this system and is it demonstrably effective. They are easy to take out, but it’s a shortsighted approach.
• Ensure that effective change management procedures are fully embedded and understood across all functions. Managing change in a truly collaborative and cross functional way is not only efficient, its great for team effectiveness and morale and is one of the single most powerful crisis prevention tools in the leadership toolkit. Often overlooked, it must have unrelenting executive team support to be effective.

If you need advise, help or support in any of these areas, contact me at: su@sudakinconsulting.com or call on +44 (0) 7984 557262

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