Barriers to Adoption of Best Practice in Egg Production Enterprises

The Australian Egg Industry has identified opportunities to optimise production performance, health, flock consistency and egg quality through best practice. Using a cross-sectional survey design for 3 stakeholder groups (farm staff, managers, and consultants), we assessed current knowledge, attitudes, practices, barriers and enablers of adoption of best practices in poultry welfare, health, biosecurity and production performance.

Of the 61 manager surveys posted, 27 were returned; of 169 staff surveys, 64 were returned, and of the 6 third party surveys posted, all 6 were returned. Of these, seven free range sites, 3 cage sites, 1 barn site and 2 office sites responded across a total of 5 producers. A further 8 sites across 4 producers expressed interest in participating but were unable to respond due to lack of time and COVID-19 constraints.

Items were assessed on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 = untrue to 5 = very true, and were averaged to compute a composite score for each of the subscales. Results showed that more than 60% of the farm staff surveyed believed that they knew their work role, task and what they were expected to do, while 77.8% of farm managers believed that they were familiar with their work task and role. Only 21.6% of farm staff believed that they regularly received constructive feedback from their supervisor compared to 44.4% of managers. Only 16.5% of the farm staff believed that their supervisor allowed them to determine how their work should be done. While 33.3% of the managers believed that they were leading by an example, only 27% of staff felt that their supervisor lead by example.

The mean score for all psychological variables were calculated using a 5-point scale, where 1 = strong negative perception and 5 = strong positive perception. On average, participants across staff, managers and consultants reported positive attitudes towards their work (4.4, 4.4, and 4.7 respectively), felt supported from others to do their work (4.1, 4.2, and 4.4, respectively), and felt they were having control over their work (4.2, 4.3, and 4.4%, respectively).

Both managers and consultants reported high levels of personal financial efficacy (4.0 and 4.0, respectively), while staff reported lower levels of financial efficacy (3.8). Time orientation (reflecting an attention bias towards past, present or future outcomes through which an individual makes meaning from experiences and external events) showed that, on average, consultants reported high levels of future thinking, followed by farm managers and staff (4.2, 3.7, and 3.5, respectively).

A higher proportion of farm managers indicated that they were very concerned about animal diseases (27.8%) while only 10.8% of farm staff were highly concerned about this. More than 30% of farm managers were concerned about the need of work training, high workload at peak times and other family commitments affecting their work performance. While comparing the concerns, the most concerning factors affecting the work performance of farm staff were financial problems (27%) while for the managers it was family commitments (50%).

Overall, our findings suggest that the areas of greatest opportunity for improvement can be found in increased training opportunities for management, addressing labour shortages, and clarifying expectations.