Monitor 24x7 Employee | Hygiene Across F&B Stores with Grid

Personal hygiene is an essential aspect of working in the Food and Beverage (F&B) service industry to ensure the safety and well-being of both customers and employees. Maintaining this prevents the spread of illness, meets health and safety standards, ensures customer confidence, and protects the reputation of the business. According to reports, trends post-COVID have seen a 20% difference in the performance of restaurants that have adequate hygiene ratings as compared to those with less stringent health and safety controls. An effective Personal Hygiene Checklist is one of the few health and safety processes essential to making this possible. This checklist guarantees that every aspect of the service process is conducted with the utmost safety and order to diminish any chances of an incident that could put the customers' health and the organization's reputation at risk.

So, let's take a closer look. The Personal Hygiene Checklist is an all-encompassing list of inspections that must be conducted on each employee before the start of every shift. It includes a collection of checkpoints representing various health and safety precautions, that every store manager must inspect before allowing his/her employees to start that day's shift. This includes washing and sanitizing their hands, maintaining oral, nail, and hair hygiene, ensuring they have no kind of jewelry on them, and most importantly not carrying any kind of disease. Failure of any checkpoint will automatically be flagged on the Grid app so that the management always stays aware of the regulations being met at their stores. The hygiene checklist is critical for maintaining high standards of health and cleanliness, and for ensuring that the restaurant is able to provide a faultless customer experience.

Why should personal hygiene checklists be used in every F&B store?

By using a systematic approach to health inspection procedures, F&B service businesses can eliminate the risk of human negligence. This leads to a healthier experience for both customers and staff and results in both enhanced reputation and revenue along with the avoidance of any resultant legal issue. Checklists are not a one-time solution though and should be regularly reviewed and updated to ensure they remain relevant and practical. As the needs and requirements of the business change, the checklists should be adjusted accordingly.

A key benefit of using personal hygiene checklists is that it provides a clear, step-by-step guide to the tasks required, which prevents the likelihood of any checkpoint being overlooked. As hygiene starts from home, they also instill complete procedure and etiquette standardization among all employees, lowering the risk of inexcusable discrepancies at any time.

Using checklists also makes tracking health standards across different branches and acting on areas for improvement much quicker. It's important to note that checklists conducted on paper make tracking a cumbersome process because data collation and management are highly prone to errors, resulting in inaccurate analysis. This is where the need to digitize your entire checklist process comes into play.

Grid's solution to manual checklists

Designed for F&B businesses that prioritize maintaining rigorous health standards in their restaurants, the Personal Hygiene Checklist template will let you run these daily audits digitally through the Grid mobile app. This template is especially ideal for businesses with multiple branches, as it ensures that the implementation of practices is consistent across all locations. The best part about digitizing via Grid is that you can move all your checklists to the app in minutes - just set up your Store Managers as users on Grid, give them access to the data, and you're done!

Once set up, the Personal Hygiene Checklist template records and tracks everyday checkpoints that have to be passed by every employee before the store's opening. The checkpoints within the template can be completely customized as per your requirements.

The Personal Hygiene Checklist contains the following list of components that need to be filled in prior to opening the store:

1. Store ID and Name: Entering the store ID and name helps provide complete transparency to management, as it becomes easy and effective to manage the functioning of multiple brands and branches.
2. Employee Name and Status: Managers need to fill in the name of the employee every day before commencing operations, and mark their status as present, absent, or not available.
3. Clean Uniform: Now comes the first checkpoint, to check that the employees' uniform, shoes, and facial hair are spotless and orderly.
4. Handwashing and Sanitization: Simple handwashing simply isn't enough, employees need to use warm water and soap, scrub for at least 20 seconds, and dry with a clean towel or air dryer. Post-pandemic, it has become mandatory for employees to follow this with proper hand sanitization.
5. Short hair, nails, and hair cover: It's critical to inspect all employees' hair and nails as any negligence could cause compromise the safety of customers, alongwith harming the reputation of the organization. Employees cannot wear nail polish or artificial nails as they can harbor bacteria, and the compulsory use of hair cover should be standardized.
6. No visible jewelry: This checkpoint ensures employees have no jewelry on them, including watches, bracelets, and rings while working as it poses an occupational hazard.
7. Is the employee chewing something: Employees must maintain oral hygiene at all times, and avoid smoking or chewing gum while on duty.
8. Any communicable disease or COVID-related symptom: Store workers who are sick, have a fever, or have any symptoms of a contagious illness, should be barred from commencing their duty.
9. Wearing masks or gloves: Wearing masks and gloves prevents the spread of infection between employees and customers. Masks prevent droplets from spreading when employees speak, cough, or sneeze, while gloves prevent the transmission of germs from the hands to surfaces or food.

How do your checklists function within the Grid app?

Knowing what the Grid Personal Hygiene template includes, let's discuss how simple and quick it is to set up all the data, checkpoints, worksheets, users, and analytics with just a few clicks and no code. The Personal Hygiene Checklist Template for the F&B Service sector automatically creates:

1. A designated workspace in your Grid account, called 'Personal Hygiene'.
2. A worksheet under the Personal Hygiene workspace, called 'Personal Hygiene Checklist'.
3. A workspace called 'Master Databases,' which contains a 'Store Database,' which includes a list of all your stores and their respective IDs.
4. A notifications system and other dependencies so that the template can run perfectly in real-time.

The Personal Hygiene Checklist worksheets are meant to be filled in by Store Managers. Once the manager fills in the checkpoints and submits the form with a single click, the data will be directly entered into the database. If the manager misses any checkpoint, the hygiene audit will be marked as incomplete. In order to integrate this template into your daily operations, all you will need are:

1. A list of your stores that are to be added to the 'Store Database' worksheet.
2. A list of users who are Store Managers for these stores.
3. A list of personal hygiene checkpoints specific to your business requirements.

Now that you know the importance of digital Personal Hygiene checklists, and how easy it is to put them into action, it's time to get the best results out of your operations. If you'd like to know more about how Grid can help you set up a checklist module that monitors all the employees across your stores, standardizes best practices, and enhances your customer experience, speak to a Grid expert and we'll get you started.

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