For this reason, production and service mistakes keep reoccurring, resulting in high employee turnover and low morale. Not to mention, low customer retention and shrinking profits.
Folks, there is only one guaranteed way to stop stupid—yes, STUPID—business mistakes.
By way of the PROMPT!
Solutions for Stupid Business Mistakes
With the PROMPT in mind, imagine someone overseeing every process; warning and prompting every employee, ensuring work is error free. Now, everyone knows that method of continual prompting is not practical, to compete in today’s business climate.
Surprisingly, that’s exactly what occurs in many small businesses. The business owner is the “go-to-person,” who is really the PROMPTER for the business’s workflow. Truth is, when the “prompter” is away, or distracted doing THEIR work, costly business mistakes happen.
Again, with the PROMPT in mind, imagine an “all-seeing A-I robot” observing production and service, ensuring zero errors on all workflow tasks. To be sure, this would be paradise; however, it’s not practical yet.
To be clear, computers aid in stopping many stupid business mistakes, by having “required fields” that employees must input before performing the next step; also, spell-checkers, etc.
In fact, robots perform better than humans do, in many repetitive workflow processes. However, WE ALL KNOW, in most businesses HUMAN performance is still critical, although aided by computers and machinery. Whereby, reliance on the human brain to remember ALL the correct steps in ALL processes is necessary for ensuring error free performance.
Sadly, that’s where STUPID happens and the “blame-game” begins!
You may be surprised to learn, someone did a study called the “Ebbinghaus forgetting curve,” whereby, Hermann Ebbinghaus documented the rate of human forgetfulness. It’s a shocking study, which should be a wake-up call for any business owner or manager relying on human memory for QUALITY service and production.
Practical Solution for Stupid Business Mistakes
Since relying on human memory is critical for most all business, there is a simple low-cost solution to reduce error to almost zero. It is an interactive, self-reporting, customizable, continually improving CHECKLIST. Moreover, there should be checklist for service, production, daily routines of all employees, and maintenance, etc.
If the work process is important to the business, those steps to complete any process should NOT be left to chance. In fact, we recommend a SYSTEMS CZAR to oversee these checklists. Yes, the Systems Czar is human!
Did I mention here? Great systems work!