I recently read the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, and he articulated perfectly everything that we have been preaching here at OpsAnalitica and so much more.
Please enjoy some paraphrased quotes from the Checklist Manifesto.
Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know have exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.
In a complex environment, experts are up against two main difficulties. The first is the fallibility of human memory and attention, especially when it comes to mundane, routine matters that are easily overlooked under the strain of more pressing events.
Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.
Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything--a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps--the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.
One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems—on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.
But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it’s “eptitude”—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly.
Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.
They supply a set of checks to ensure the stupid but critical stuff is not overlooked, and they supply another set of checks to ensure people talk and coordinate and accept responsibility while nonetheless being left the power to manage the nuances and unpredictabilities the best they know how.
Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated.
What we see from OpsAnalitica's perspective is that we do checklists so we can control what we have to control in our businesses. So that we can ensure that our teams are checking off all these items, that we have already identified, that can hurt our business when they aren't handled.
As stated earlier, when a store has a high checklist completed percentage of 75% or more, customer satisfaction and sales increase over stores that aren't doing their checklists.
So many of the bad experiences that customers have with us aren't these huge things. They are these little aggravating misses that just add up to ruin an experience with our business. We call it death by 1000 cuts.
The checklists help guide our employees to pay attention to the little things that really matter.
Checklists go far beyond just controlling just what we can control. Checklists take the guesswork out of running the business. Checklists can reduce employee stress by spelling out what they need to do and when. Checklists make locations operate better which provides management with opportunities to provide positive feedback to teams.
I asked a new client at a veterinary clinic yesterday: Isn't it stressful not knowing if your teams are doing their tasks correctly? She stated Yes!!!!!
We have a get out the door for school checklist that we just implemented at my house recently. I asked my daughter do you like the checklist? She is 10 by the way, she stated she liked it because she knows exactly what she needs to do.
Your team deserves to know what they need to do and when and they deserve to work in the least stressful environment you can create for them. Checklists do both of those things.
More importantly, and you should stress this in your training, checklists give employees a voice with management. Their comments and photos are used to crowdsource ideas and solutions to problems. Plus the data they are collecting allows management to be more effective decision-makers and to create a better work environment.
When an employee completes a checklist accurately, they are doing a great job, they are contributing to making their location better, and they are also making the company better. All of this leads to happier customers and business growth which comes back to employees in the form of raises, better benefits, and better work life.
Checklists are the most powerful tool ever invented to make it easier to guide employees and manage complex operations. These processes that you are implementing have a bigger impact on sales, profitability, and customer satisfaction than any other thing your company does. These processes directly affect daily operations, the backbone of your business.
Don't ever forget that.