complimentary thinklets – third quarter 2022
checklist tips
An emergency response or crisis plan can be thought of as a library. Within that library, your team will need to check out materials to help them carry out your plan.
Oftentimes, the most helpful items in a plan are the individual checklists. These provide guidance to your team members on their specific duties and responsibilities.
Here are a few tips to ensure your checklists are more useful to your team.
1. Where possible, make them familiar. If your company has standardised checklists for everyday work, try to mirror that format in your crisis checklists. People usually perform better when they work with tools that are familiar to them.
2. If you are starting from scratch or you can customise a bit, try to provide visual references. For my checklists, I like to add colours to help priortise items. Red for the most critical, orange or amber for the next most critical, then yellow and so on. I have found that once trained, people will focus on the colours and that helps ensure they don’t gloss over something thinking it is less important than another item.
3. I cannot count how many times I have heard that a checklist should be no more than one page. That’s just a gimmick. What does one page even mean these days … hard copy, laptop display, mobile phone screen? Yes, checklists should be as brief as possible. However, checklists should also be as long as they need to be to ensure the role accomplishes its objectives.
4. Following onto #3, I like to do combination checklists that allow my team to choose what works for them. I start with a very basiccolour-coded list of duties and responsibilities. I call that the WHAT checklist. A well-trained and conscientious team member can do the job with just that sheet. However, I complement that with a HOW checklist that provides detailed directions on how to accomplish the various duties. This often includes pictures, maps, and examples to improve clarity which cuts down on back-and-forth communications during critical moments as well as overall errors.
5. Ensure your checklist has a place for individuals to note who performed which task, at which time, and on which date. That will be important for your lawyers and insurance people later.
6. Spell out clearly what people have the authority to do on their own and what would require an approval request. I usually have these as attachments to the checklist. For example, in my airline days, I attached a “Purchase Guidelines” page that shared what people could spend to assist customers without checking with Head Office.
There are many other useful tips out there for checklists. We are ready to help you with those if you need additional assistance.
Be different. Be ready.