Quality Control – How to make checklists work for you

We've all been told that checklists are the answer!... tick this and your quality will be great, but have you checked in with your team? Are they sick of ticking boxes? Are you really sure your quality checks achieve what you need them to? Maybe it's time to reinvent your quality control system and fix up your check process to make it more engaging and actually useful

A few pointers to consider

While record keeping is key for any quality check system (or any check system at all, be that food safety, maintenance etc) it has to be useful, not just a tick box exercise (see what I did there?).

Tick box checklists do a lot of things, often not necessarily good: 

• They make it easy to circumvent the system, tick 'em all off at the end of the run or end of the shift and hand them in.
• They don't prompt any actual thought process about what they are supposed to be checking and why.
• If not digital they create a lot of paperwork that you then have to keep somewhere!
• If following up on a complaint and looking back, they give no information or context of the conditions on the day, and you have to paw through screeds of pages to find what you're after.
• Paperwork versions create A LOT of admin work for your Quality Assurance team. They have to manually enter them into a spreadsheet just to get any kind of use out of them. Then they have to file them all.And then archive them.And then destroy them after the destruction date has rolled around.

How to make them useful

So, how do you make your quality checks more useful, more interactive, more accessible?Here are some tips, the more you can apply the more useful they'll be! 

Risk based checks

Run an analysis of your current quality checks.Look at risk vs reward.Is your most time consuming, cumbersome check for something that happens once a year and probably costs you far less than the time spent that year on checking? Nothing demotivates a team faster than wasting time on pointless work. Also regular reviewing is useful as some times things are put in place for an issue that is no longer relevant!

Training

Review your training for the quality checks required. Are you telling them to just do them? No context? People will always buy in more if they understand a) why you're doing this and b) what the potential outcomes are for both the business and your customers. You do have to walk the line between not enough and too much information, but general experience suggests that often there are things the customer experiences that the operational team hadn't even thought about! 

Knowing WHY they are doing the check will infinitely raise the likelihood they will do them and do them properly. Also be sure to utilise photos and short videos in your training as this is much clearer and circumvents language barriers or assumptions on how to do something. (You'd be amazed how many people don't know how to apply a tape measure correctly for the job at hand!).

Consultation

Make them THINK!

Go Digital

Utilise Sampling

This is particularly great in some manufacturing environments where they can sample a run and indicate on the sample itself what they've checked and what the outcome was. This means that line leaders / supervisors / auditors can come along at any time and verify the accuracy of the checks. This leads to great conversations and opportunities to see where perhaps the checks aren't helpful or quite practical or where training gaps might be or if the teams understanding is different to what you expected.

So take the time to review your quality system and make sure its giving you the best bang for buck! 

Your team will thank you for it!