The Win-Win Organizational Culture of Social Compliance Puts Your Certification to Work for Your Business
True social compliance is more than satisfying the laws of the country of business or checking boxes for a particular audit. When done well, it is ongoing, changing and active through your improved workplace culture.
Your social certification goes to work for you through the benefits of an organizational culture that engages workers, establishes new and transferable channels of communication and facilitates processes of continuous improvement.
The workforce development training involved in achieving EFI’s social certification educates workers about their role and impact on the supply chain and the end consumer – often highlighting the people and processes involved in getting food on grocery store shelves. Workers who understand their role and impact take more ownership in the quality and safety and are more engaged. An engaged workforce improves efficiency, productivity and quality.
When you have an established continuous improvement culture and systems for incorporating worker voice, even an audit can be an opportunity to further engage workers in addressing previously unnoticed weak areas and ensuring your company’s intentions become realties.
Grower Perspectives
“Empowering our workers has greatly improved our ability to pack a high-quality product for our customer. With our GoodFarms brand, we’ve been able to close the conversation loop, sharing stories from the farm and hearing consumer feedback that we can pass on to our farmworkers who get to see that they are making an impact on a person’s life. Those kind of experiences evolve into the bottom line.” – Amalia Zimmerman-Lommel, Director of Human Resources for Andrew & Williamson Fresh Produce/GoodFarms
“When we have a third party coming to our facilities for these audits, they’re not just going through the documentation but also talking to our people. It really opens our eyes to see all these opportunities that we haven’t seen. It’s a way of improving continuously and making sure our efforts are really working.” – Pamela Aceves, Human Resources Business Partner Director for F&A & IT NatureSweet
“EFI is fundamentally different from other audit programs. In other audits there is no mechanism in place to ensure that things are happening properly in between audits. The EFI model empowers the staff to keep the business honest to the set of criteria that we agreed to execute on. It’s nice to have a third party validate the good things that we are doing as a company and make recommendations on where you can improve.” – Kevin Doran, CEO of Houweling’s Group
