It’s almost the end of the shift, and the label printer is jammed. Instead of fixing it, the worker in the warehouse decides not to tag a pallet of cleaning supplies. Three weeks go by, and the new temp grabs a bottle off that pallet. They assume it’s a floor cleaner and pour it into the parts washer. Now you have $2,000 (USD) worth of damage to the machine components, and the packaging line is shut down for half a day.
Will anyone get fired over this? Well, no. Mistakes happen, and as a business owner, you know that.
But when you think about the fact that a tiny issue became a massive issue, you start thinking about how to prevent this type of risk/escalation.
That’s how risk works – it’s silent, and it thrives on with little mistakes and boring stuff everyone thinks will ‘be fine.’
What Happens on the Ground Shows Up in the Numbers
Depending on the industry, the way frontline operations look differs.
If you look at healthcare, it looks like a nurse aide checking on a resident who’s bedridden. If you look at logistics, you see a dock worker verifying a shipping label. But whether you look at healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, or hospitality, you see one thing: there’s a bunch of seemingly small decisions people make every day. They decide if they’ll follow procedure or take a shortcut, which also means they decide if they’ll protect the company or (slowly) cost it money.
The cause and effect are simple.
A worker misses a maintenance check, and then down the road, a truck breaks down. Or a driver misses a delivery, which prompts the customer to ask for a discount. When it comes to financial performance, you can’t focus on strategy alone. You also need to see if the people on the ground do things the way they’re supposed to do them, shift after shift.
Healthcare is a great example of this because the risk is everywhere, and it’s extremely high.
Take nursing homes, for instance.
Here, workers are supposed to turn residents who are confined to their beds every 2 hours, which is a physically demanding task. It’s one of those things that’s easy to skip when you’re in a hurry, but if you look at all those bedsore settlements and verdicts, it’s very obvious why even skipping it one time can be very problematic.
It’s a 30-second task that, if it’s ignored enough, ends up costing an insane amount of money, not to mention how much it hurts the facility’s reputation.
What Keeps Risk Under Control Day to Day
Every company has a binder full of procedures, and it’s usually sitting somewhere on a shelf. That binder can’t do anything to control risk. What DOES control risk is the boring stuff people do every day. Here’s how that looks.
Clear Steps People Follow
There’s always a gap between the procedure that’s on paper and what people actually do when they get to work. So, the written procedure might say ‘Complete section 7 of form 12B before initiating transfer,’ but does that actually happen like that every time?
No, because the person doing that job knows that form takes 4 minutes, and they have the supervisor yelling in their ear about speed.
So, what’s the smart move here? Easy; make the steps simple and repeatable.
If doing things the right way is easier than skipping steps, then nobody will be tempted to take shortcuts. Even when they’re rushing, people will still follow short and obvious steps.
Training That Looks the Same as Real Work
If your training is done in a classroom with a pile of slides and a quiz, but the work is done on a noisy floor with a broken printer, then your training doesn’t prepare anyone for work.
That means that all new hires should be walked through the mess that they’ll deal with, like the jammed label printer, a combative client, or what have you. Repetition is another important part of training because a person who has practiced the response 3 times in a realistic setting will be much calmer when they have to repeat it under pressure.
On the other hand, a person who only saw a PowerPoint will freeze.
Knowing What’s Happening in Real Time
You can’t fix a problem that you don’t know exists.
That sounds pretty obvious, and yet, most companies find out about issues weeks after they’ve happened, which means – after the damage has already been done. So, you may as well be working blind.
You should work on better visibility.
That could be through a simple checklist employees fill out after every shift, or a reporting system that takes 30 seconds to use. Also, a supervisor who actually pays attention to what happens on the floor and asks questions is helpful, as well.
Clear Responsibility
This is a big one. When someone misses doing a task, it’s often because they didn’t know they were supposed to do it. If there’s 3 different people thinking someone else has to check the fire extinguisher, do you know who checks it? No one.
The fix is extremely simple. Just name one person for each routine task. They don’t necessarily have to do it on their own, but they’re the ones who have to verify it got done.
When accountability is clear, there’s no confusion.
Conclusion
Humidity checks aren’t exciting, and nobody’s looking forward to filling out bed turn logs.
But unless you’re okay with writing big, fat checks all the time, all of this is necessary. The boring, repetitive things you do every day aren’t here to annoy anyone or to waste your time. They’re there for a reason.
