Scheduling is one of the most powerful features in the OpsAnalitica Platform and it is simultaneously one of the most eye-opening realizations for Management.
We have recently done an analysis of our client's data and the ROI for checklists is in. We have found that when your locations do 75% + of their checklists that customer satisfaction at the store level starts to go crazy. We have multiple chains showing that the stores with the best OpsAnalitica Compliance have 90% higher customer satisfaction scores than stores within the same chain with bad checklist compliance.
Those higher customer satisfaction scores translate into sales increases of 3 to 8% higher sales. Checklist Compliance or making sure that your stores are doing their checklists regularly is one of the simplest ways to increase customer sat and sales.
When you use paper checklists, you can believe whatever you want about how well your team is doing at using your checklists and tools because it is almost impossible to see what they are really doing and what they aren't.
When you implement OpsAnalitica we show you accurately what is happening in your locations from a checklist completion and pencil-whipping perspective. For a lot of people, this is a very eye-opening and sobering experience because they now know with 100% accuracy and clarity what is really happening at the locations.
This also puts management under a lot of pressure to come up with strategies to increase checklist compliance.
Let's break this down.
Checklist Schedules have several key times:
From Time: when the checklist becomes available to be worked.
To Time: When the checklist is supposed to be completed.
Allow Late Time: this is a period of time after the To Time that team members can start the checklist late.
We have this time because your teams operate in the real world and sometimes they can't get to their checklists on time.
We schedule Checklists for the following reasons:
To make sure teams are doing tasks when they are operationally significant to the business and drive the most value and return vs. letting them do their tasks when it is most convenient for the employee.
Ex: it does your business no good to do a tasting checklist for food quality after lunch. Then you find out that your sauces didn't taste right and you already served them to your customers.
The Food Tasting has to be done before lunch so you can fix your mistakes if any before they affect customers.
Schedules make it easy for management to see which locations and team members are doing their jobs the way they are supposed to.
Without schedules, you would have to download a list of locations and checklists and use complicated spreadsheet formulas to back into who did what and when.
With Schedules, it is effortless to see how a location or patch of locations are performing on completing their tasks and checklists.
There are four statuses that a Scheduled Checklist can be in:
Available: This is when the checklist is available to be completed.
On-Time: This is the status of a checklist that was submitted On-Time, or before the To Time.
Late: This is the status of a checklist that was started in the Allow Late Period and submitted.
Late is still a complete checklist it was just started after the To Time.
Late was developed to show management that they might have too aggressive schedules for some checklists.
If a large majority of your team can't get a specific checklist done On-Time then maybe you need to adjust the schedule.
Missed: After the Allow Late Period expires, the checklist will no longer be able to be completed on the schedule and at that point, it becomes officially Missed.
Once a checklist is missed, you can never submit it on schedule and get credit.
Once a checklist is missed, it drops off of the schedule completely.
In this screenshot from the Checklists Dashboard, you can see the different statuses of the checklists.
Complete: is the sum of the On-Time and Late Submitted Checklists.
Complete provides you with one number that you can use to determine what percentage of checklist schedules are getting completed.
The Missed Percentage will be the inverse of the Complete Percentage and if you add them together you should get 100%.
What is Schedule Compliance?
Schedule Compliance is when your team members complete their scheduled checklists either On-Time or Late. The Complete Percentage shows you how well your organization is doing at Schedule Compliance.
How do you get your teams to do their checklists and what is important to your organization?
I'll be the first to admit that when we started OpsAnalitica I was very black-and-white on this issue and I only saw Compliance in one way. You do every checklist every day.
That is not realistic for the following reasons:
Not every checklist is as important as every other checklist.
Not every business has the same standards for checklist compliance.
A lot of checklists were originally designed unrealistically and therefore even when an employee made a real attempt to complete them, it would be impossible with the other demands of their positions. Too Long to complete.
Past Checklist Management has set some bad organizational habits:
Management couldn't hold people accountable with paper checklists so employees learned that they could get away without doing their checklists.
There are no real consequences for not doing your checklists.
For most audits that have a checklist compliance question, the question isn't worth enough points to really hurt the score. Not doing your checklists doesn't auto-fail their audit.
No one is getting fired or losing their bonus for not doing checklists.
Checklists are not viewed as important or essential for running great operations.
The only way to get people to do their checklists is to have a carrot-and-stick program in place.
Team members get rewarded for high checklist compliance and there are actual penalties for not completing your checklists.
You have to be realistic about the checklists and how they fit into the person's daily routine and job responsibilities.
Strategies for achieving High Checklist Compliance:
Design your checklists with a goal in mind.
Shorter checklists are easier to complete.
If you are creating a readiness checklist, then keep it focused on readiness.
Break the categories into different roles or parts of the location.
No one gets extra credit for making a long checklist.
Design the checklist so you get the desired readiness by reminding the team to check the most important items and skip things that are less important.
Make your schedule windows longer.
We are firm believers that your checklists should have long Allow Late Periods to allow end users as much time as possible to get the checklist done on a schedule.
There is a balance here. We need a safety checklist to be done before the shift begins to keep team members and customers safe. Ideally, it gets done before the shift begins but we have to ask ourselves do we want to let people complete it late. Is it better to have one done late or does that create a risk or liability?
If you have a checklist that runs several times a day, before each shift, a good practice is to run the Allow Late Period right up to the next schedule. This will help with compliance and show you how your team is doing on getting things done.
Push Delegation and Real-time Collaboration to your teams
One of the biggest reasons that checklists don't get done is that in a lot of organizations the responsibility for completing the checklists falls solely on the MOD.
A lot of readiness checklists also can only be completed at times when the MOD is the busiest right before the shift begins.
This creates a conflict of interest. Do I get the location and the team ready to go so we can have a great shift or do I do this checklist? Any manager with their salt will opt to get the business and the team ready to go because that is a high priority.
If you can have your managers delegate sections of the checklist to team members, have the team members complete the checklist for their stations or job responsibilities. Utilize OpsAnalitica's Real-Time Collaboration where multiple people can complete the same checklist simultaneously. This can cut checklist completion times down significantly.
The goal of the checklist is to ensure that the business is ready and safe for customers. If you can delegate and use real-time collaboration to complete checklists accurately and quickly that is a win, win, win. The business wins, the employees win, and the customers win.
This is probably the most important thing you can do for checklist compliance, make the checklist easier to complete while still getting an ROI.
Use Notifications
OpsAnalitica provides Late and Completed notifications today. We are adding Schedule Start and Missed Notifications to the platform.
Notifications can be sent to different groups of people in real time when those statuses change.
You should strategize with Operations to determine what checklists are most important and how you are going to manage compliance as an organization and then design your notifications to accomplish those goals.
Originally our notifications were all or nothing but this year we have really dialed in the checklist notifications to go from drinking from a fire hose to drinking from a water fountain.
Determine which checklists are the highest priority for business success and set up appropriate notifications to manage those processes in real time. Manage lesser processes over a time period using reporting.
Notifications can be sent to the internal inbox, no one looks at that, they can also be sent via Push Notifications to devices, Email, and to other programs like Microsoft Teams and Slack via email-to-board functionality.
The Why Behind Checklists
Checklists Work
Checklists are the best system we have today to run better operations and increase sales and customer satisfaction.
They are the most effective tool to manage teams across multiple locations.
This is the Why for doing checklists and you have to drill that into the heads of your teams.
One of our clients did a study and they found that the locations that did their checklists accurately and had high compliance had customer satisfaction scores on average 89% higher than the locations that didn’t do their checklists. Why? Because they caught things before they affected Customer Satisfaction.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Data-driven decisions are better than experience-based decisions.
For years businesses didn’t have as much access to data and they had to rely on hunches and experience.
Now with OpsAnalitica, you are able to collect endless amounts of data and that data allows your experienced managers to make better decisions than they could in the past. Better decisions lead to better operations.
Checklists give employees a voice that they didn’t have before
When an employee leaves a comment or takes a photo they are communicating what is actually happening right to management.
This gives them a voice that they never had in the past.
Carrot and Stick
Set real incentives for doing checklists accurately and on time.
Set real consequences for not completing checklists.
Commit to your goals for compliance and know that no business ever got successful but not holding their teams accountable.
All of the above strategies will help your organization be more successful in achieving high compliance rates. Let me be clear, Compliance is 100% based on your management team holding your locations accountable for doing their checklists. Without accountability and real consequences, you will not be successful.