Operations: Making the Most of Daily Checklists

In my last blog, I spoke about how moving daily checklists to an electronic form (Google Docs) has helped to keep me organized and get more accurate results from my team. What I failed to mention was that simply creating a checklist does not mean that you will automatically start seeing unbelievable success amongst all your staff.

Instead, what is important is that your team understands and buys into why it’s necessary checklists are done thoroughly and properly every single day. What I also left out was how often we went through the checklists to make sure we were asking the right things, at the right times.

Oftentimes, checklists are created, but the follow up on these lists are not performed. As a result, areas begin to be skipped, work begins to deteriorate and overall production goes down. To ensure that this doesn’t happen to you and your team it is important to make sure that your team knows and understands the reasons for their work. Is their department’s mission statement clear, are goals clearly set and evaluations clearly aligned?

It is also very important to make sure you take into account the suggestions and input of your team when creating the lists for each department. When we created the checklists for our clubs, it was reviewed and edited multiple times based on the comments and suggestions from the team. In fact, it still goes through changes to this day. It was clear from the beginning that a perfect checklist will never exist, as a company is constantly changing and developing more and more each day.

We go through the results of our checklists every day. We follow up immediately on the staffs’ suggestions and comments in regards to different areas of the club. In doing so we are able to show our team that we are constantly listening to their needs and areas of improvement.

Reviewing the results daily also allows us to keep track of trends in workflow, either in the negative or positive direction, thus altering the areas we provide more coaching on. At the end of each month, when performing staff evaluations, we include the results of our checklists to evaluate the level of work that is completed. We can then create stronger game plans for each employee to improve, based on the actual work, rather than the subjective views of others.

If you decide to implement a detailed checklist into your workforce, remember that it should be constantly evolving and evaluated regularly. Otherwise, it will begin to be overlooked and undervalued by the rest of your team.

Adrian Antigua is the operations manager for Gainesville Health and Fitness in Tioga, Fla. Formerly a desk manager, Antigua is heavily involved in customer service and staff training. For questions on operations, e-mail Antigua at AdrianA@ghfc.com.