Incorporating checklists into your business processes, to establish a higher level of base-line performance for you and your team, can pay big dividends in making your business more efficient and error-free.

Whether simple or complex, checklists are great tools to improve effectiveness and efficiency. They help get important tasks accomplished which improves business performance.

There are a multitude of checklists you can use but it is important to utilise the checklist that will prove to be the most beneficial for your business. The idea is to improve operations with timely accomplishments rather than create more work, waste time, or reduce efficiency. 

Organisations often say they are too busy to make a checklist, they need to fix their problems now. That is obviously a problem, sacrificing tomorrow to put out today’s fire, it’s not really putting out the fire, you are just reducing the heat, it’ll come back tomorrow.

Some of the ways checklists streamline the running of your business are , establishing better accountability in the workplace,  making big tasks easier to manage and saving money and time by improving efficiencies

Creates accountability

Once you hire a team to work with you, it’s important to put systems in place that support team members efforts to do a good job. A checklist is particularly handy to support a system approach to completing tasks while also promoting staff accountability to perform the tasks they are required to do.

Make big tasks easier to manage

Big tasks are easier to tackle with the help of checklists. Not only do checklists allow you to plan what needs to be done ahead of time, they allow you to list everything that needs to be done – down to the tiniest detail – so nothing is forgotten or overlooked.

Time savings in the long run

What if, by implementing your checklist you reduced your rework by 50%, what would that mean to you in terms of both available time and cost? Obviously, both are reduced but what also happens in that throughput increases, fewer things get held up in your repair loop, fewer products or raw materials may be scrapped , more sales result and profits go up since you didn’t employ anyone extra to achieve this new output level. Surely that would more than offset any slight delay while making a checklist to capture any errors.

Checklists are used the world over in critical and non-critical environments to ensure things don’t get missed and that the work is done to the best possible standard. Digital checklists are very flexible, can be distributed and accessed on mobile devices while reducing paper waste and the costs of printing and storage. LeanBPI can create a quick and easy digital checklists based on your needs.