Behaviour is the issue

The need

Good hand hygiene is a critical process in any food or pharmaceutical business. Poorly cleaned hands are one of the major sources of contamination risk.

Hand washing is a relatively simple process, and people can be trained to do it properly relatively easily. Even though that is the case, it needs to be remembered that it is something that is completed multiple times a day by each employee and it is a monotonous, repeatable and manual process that requires a human being to pay attention each time. And these are precisely the types of processes that human beings are not so good at.

Enforcing compliance

Good handwashing equipment with automated soap dispensers, carefully calibrated antibacterial agents, high-quality sinks and dryers are obviously essential but even with all these things in place, the job of the hygiene manager is far from done. As hand washing is a manual process, once the essential equipment is in place, the focus of the hygiene manager is on the human element, on enforcing behaviour. The weak link will be the randomness in the process introduced by having fallible human beings conduct repetitive tasks. Essentially, good hygiene now becomes a matter of psychology.

Various methods and tools exist to ensure compliance with proper protocol every time. Obviously, good training is the starting point. Washing hands properly is not difficult, but it does require the correct technique and so training needs to be given. But human beings are prone to err and forget and cut corners, especially on boring repetitive tasks like hand washing, so training alone is not enough. It would be a foolish hygiene manager who simply ensured the proper technique was taught during induction and then left it at that.

The power of culture

Human beings are social animals. The need for people to conform with the herd is a very strong instinct; this instinct can be used to drive the correct behaviour. When a set of norms gets well established and becomes “just the way we do things around here”, we call this culture, and culture is a powerful driving force.

One of the main goals of any hygiene manager should be to instil a culture of hygiene. If achieved, this culture will become a self-policing force that will modify the behaviour of everyone. The workforce themselves will be the ones that enforce the hygiene rules.

Getting to that ideal state is, however, tricky; it requires a constant effort of cultural reinforcement. We need reminders of why it’s important, posters, retraining and basically continual messaging to ensure this sticks. Establishing and maintaining such a high-care culture is difficult and will require constant attention, especially if there is a transient workforce, as is the case in many food processing factories. The constant flux of new people means that cultural reinforcement is a continual requirement.

Culture is often not enough

It is, however, a sad reality that such cultural ideals are not often reached. In most cases, hygiene managers must reach for the stick as well as the carrot. This is where monitoring comes in. CCTV monitoring, spot checks, swab checks and the like, all backed up with punitive measures for non-compliance, are also part of the mix. If you can’t get everyone to buy into a culture of hygiene willingly, then the business needs to ensure there is a penalty for non-compliance and a reasonable risk of being caught.

This is hard work

If you think this all seems like hard work, then you are not alone. Getting variable human beings to comply with processes, especially boring manual ones, is a challenge for any organisation or government. Billions of pounds of advertising have been spent to try and get people to do even basic things that are in their own self-interest. For example, think about all those government campaigns to get people to do something very obvious, like not drink and drive. It took mass advertising over a decade or so, and eventually the culture around drinking and driving changed from being something everyone did to something only fools did. But it took decades and had to be combined with monitoring and strict punitive measures. Changing and maintaining culture is hard work.

If humans were all rational actors, then getting people to comply with basic processes would be easy, but we are not rational beings, and hence all the money and time spent trying to get groups of humans to act in a common-sense way. This phenomenon is a universal part of human behaviour, and there is nothing unique about enforcing good hand-washing protocol. Hygiene managers are fighting against basic human psychology, and hence the need for constant reinforcement, training, monitoring and punitive measures. The war will never end. Humans will always be humans, and we are not rational creatures.

An easier way

Of course, there is another way that is easier. A way that is tried and tested in many other processes across all sectors of business. Whenever there is a repeatable, mundane and frequently performed process that is essential to conduct in a uniform and measurable manner, we turn to automation. In such processes, we try to remove the human element as much as possible and instead have a machine complete the process.

Machines don’t have a will of their own, they are not emotional, they don’t get tired, they don’t cut corners; they just follow the process they have been programmed/designed to follow. Machines will do so in exactly the same way each and every time. This is precisely why we automate these types of repetitive processes.

Automated hand-washing machines do exist and are widely used in the USA. With an automated hand-washing machine, the member of staff simply puts their hands in the machine and, 12 seconds later, their hands are washed properly, dosed with antibacterials and rinsed, with a validated 99.9% pathogen kill. There is no technique to get wrong. The machine will deliver the exact same process each time with no variation because it’s a machine and that’s what they are good at! The human involvement is simply putting one’s hands in the right place and then drying them afterwards.

A replacement for a hygiene culture?

So, is automation a replacement for a culture of hygiene? Absolutely not! Hygiene is far more than just hand washing for starters, but further than that, having well-trained, hygiene-focused people will mean you have a workforce that is actively seeking out potential issues. There is no substitute for that kind of rigour.

Automated hand washing will improve compliance in one key area of hygiene; it removes one key headache for hygiene managers and allows efforts to be focused on other areas. So, this is not a magic bullet, but it is a very useful weapon that removes one particular problem. It is far easier to standardise and improve a single process than to modify the minds of hundreds of wilful, irrational and unique human beings.

Find out more about Meritech's hand wash stations here.