With restaurants, pubs, bars and other hospitality venues reopening, a major challenge for their operators will be to maintain high hygiene and safety standards expected by customers, staff and also public health authorities. Indeed, despite the accelerating vaccine roll-out, it appears that extra sanitary measures are here to stay – especially given the unpredictable emergence of different virus variants.
Increased internal checks for safety, health & hygiene
Food safety and hygiene is a key concern already high on the agenda of hospitality venues. This includes standards in the kitchen and food serving areas, food storage areas, cellars, temperature in fridges and freezers, cooking equipment condition, staff personal hygiene practice and training, pest control…
In addition to this, venues have to comply with health & safety norms like fire, electrical, gas or plumbing safety, trips and falls hazards, building interior and exterior conditions, workplace health and safety… And finally, each venue or brand may have its own set of standard operating procedures, customer service requirements, promotional displays and other standards.
But in addition to the usual checks, there will now be the extra burden of monitoring Covid-19 prevention measures. Social distancing and signage, PPE, hand hygiene, Trace & Test contact management, cleaning and sanitation of frequent touch surfaces, handling of linen and uniforms, disinfection procedures after a Covid-positive guest presence… The list can be long, depending on the venue.
Conducting all these checks on paper forms or excel sheets can quickly become a very onerous process. Making your checklists digital with a simple inspections app like GoAudits can help you save lots of time – especially when it comes to retrieving documentation during the external inspections.
Expect extra inspections by public health authorities
With different Covid-19 safety measures in each locality, expect increased attention from local public health authorities. To be always compliant and ready anytime for inspections by Environmental Health Officials, hospitality venues need to be able to show documentation and evidence of regular internal checks.
To build trust with the local health authorities, the best approach is to demonstrate proactive actions. Keep accurate records of frequent checks, issues found, and how those issues were addressed. Once again, this extra admin burden can be lessened by moving to digital auditing tools like GoAudits.
Adopting paperless auditing tools
2020-2021 will forever be remembered as the year where digitization significantly accelerated. This also applies to simple hotel and restaurant processes like hygiene checklists.
GoAudits is used by large and small hospitality operators (e.g. Independent Food Company restaurants, Greene King pubs, Domino’s Pizza restaurants, as well as hospitality health & safety consultancies like Castle Food or Hygiene&Safety Consultants. They conduct paperless and efficient audits for food safety, hygiene and EHS standards, as well as internal standards for premises, operating procedures, promotional displays etc.
With the digital auditing app like GoAudits, you will instantly get neat reports that are easy to retrieve, with all information in one place.
One of the key benefits is that they can easily pull out the relevant evidence of regular self-audits, any issues and remedial actions, and therefore gain the trust of health authorities.
The software is easy to use, affordable, and flexible
Find more information about GoAudits auditing and inspections app for restaurants, pubs and hospitality venues: simply click here.
