EFI Leadership Team Training
EFI Leadership Teams are central to earning EFI certification. A farming operation seeking EFI certification convenes farmworkers, managers and other staff in a Leadership Team, which then receives customized training to build skills and assume its role ensuring compliance with the EFI Standards. After certification, the Leadership Team engages the entire workforce in ongoing verification, providing customers and consumers with an added layer of assurance about worker and food safety.
Purpose
Leadership Teams are tasked with the following to help cultivate an engaged workforce:
- Understanding the EFI Standards
- Identifying problems that affect compliance
- Proposing potential solutions
- Communicating with the broader workforce about EFI so everyone can share insight and ideas for complying with the standards.
Phase 1: Leadership Team Assembly and Composition
Each EFI Leadership Team is composed of 8–20 people, depending on the size of the farming operation. The team make-up should accurately reflect workforce demographics, balancing management and labor from all the different work functions of each farming operation as well as gender and region.
Phase 2: Leadership Team Training
Leadership Team members receive a minimum of 32 hours of training from EFI’s workforce development facilitators on effective problem-solving processes, data gathering, communication and conflict resolution. The popular education model used in the training illustrates the human-centered design that EFI strives to bring to entire farming operations.
Training Approach & Methodology
EFI’s approach recognizes that each person on the Leadership Team brings a unique and valuable set of skills and experiences to the role.
EFI delivers participatory, multilingual trainings for participants with a wide range of cultural backgrounds, schooling and literacy levels, skill sets and life experiences. Every effort is made to adapt the training schedule to meet the needs of each farm operation.
Training Objectives and Content
Objective 1: Learn about the EFI Program and Standards
The training begins with activities to deepen understanding of EFI’s history, philosophy and vision, diverse stakeholders, and the importance of developing a collaborative approach to the standards.
Participants learn how EFI’s certification program works and begin to explore its comprehensive standards on labor-management cooperation, labor practices, food safety and processing and packing facilities. Finally, the team links their intent in pursuing the EFI Program to the standards.
Objective 2: Explore the purpose and structure of the Leadership Team
The Leadership Team is guided in understanding the intent of a representative Leadership Team, its relationship with management and workers across processes and areas, and its key role in achieving and maintaining EFI certification through ongoing verification, collaboration and continuous improvement.
Participants acquire skills for organizing and conducting productive meetings that will continue throughout the duration of the EFI certification.
Objective 3: Strengthen skills in communication, and conflict Resolution, and meeting coordination
The Leadership Team explores concepts and methods of effective communication, including listening skills, consensus building, identifying common interests and addressing differences through respectful dialogue and problem-solving.
Objective 4: Strengthen problem-solving abilities
The Leadership Team begins working on real issues related to the EFI Standards. Using a data-driven problem-solving cycle, the team identifies issues affecting compliance with the EFI standards, gathers and analyzes information and proposes viable alternatives that may be implemented to ensure compliance.
Participants acquire skills for group problem-solving and decision-making based on common interests and assessing effectiveness of solutions.
Objective 5: Teach Co-workers about the EFI Program and Standards
The Leadership Team explores their role and design strategies for informing and training coworkers and engaging them in the shared task of ensuring compliance
Participants acquire effective techniques for communicating with coworkers about EFI.
Training Materials
EFI provides each team member with a training manual containing the complete curriculum, along with additional training materials and key EFI Program documents. These materials are available in English and Spanish.
Phase 3: Attestation and Certificates of Completion
Upon successful completion of the core Leadership Team training, EFI will provide an Attestation which the grower and team will be required to present during audits as evidence of compliance with Labor Management Cooperation indicators. EFI will also provide an individual Certificate of Completion to each Leadership Team training participant.
Phase 4: Leadership Team Support and Follow-Up
EFI facilitators will work with the Leadership Team on a process for ongoing support. This may include electronic communications with management and the team following the training. The grower may also schedule a follow-up visit for support and refresher training, which is designed around the needs and priorities of the Leadership Team.
For a print-friendly version of Leadership Team Training information, download our fact sheet.
