Mai’s Wellington-based food truck company has been doing well for a few years now. She’s thinking about recruiting teams to work in new trucks in other New Zealand cities. She started off running a small truck by herself, as a way to work with her love of cooking.
She enjoys the practical side of cooking and interacting with customers. However, as the company’s popularity increased through word of mouth, she bought a larger truck, recruited staff and found herself spending more time on administrative tasks.
While Mai is on holiday, her niece Samantha tells her that some of the employees have been using the deep-fat fryer without being trained. Mai knows that the fryer can be dangerous.
To keep her staff safe, she needs to make sure they have all the safety information they need.
Mai realises that her duties as a director are about more than just her own actions.
She needs to make sure her employees act properly too. She needs to create procedures to ensure the truck is run safely while she’s away.
She can’t rely on everything ‘being in her head’ anymore. This will become even more important when she expands the company into other cities, as she can only be in one place at a time.
When she gets home from her holiday, Mai prints out all of the health and safety processes needed to run the truck. She laminates them and pins them up in the right places around the truck, so her employees see them every day.
She trains each staff member to make sure they understand the risks of using the deep fat fryer.
She also organises a first-aid training course for her staff to do together, and makes sure they know where the first-aid kit is.