Without a Prevention System, employee mistakes cause customer loss, internal back-biting, and reduced profits—discouraging frustrations for business owners!
When errors happen, guess who pays for them? That’s right, the Owner. Moreover, employees get paid to redo the work; and they are often paid overtime, due to rush. Not bad for the employee; but tough for the Owner!
Amazingly, when asking an employee to perform quality control checklists to ensure error-free work, owners tend to meet with the employee’s disapproval. In fact, we’ve heard many business owners say, “My employees refuse to do quality control checklists.” I’m not kidding!
Who’s the boss, I wonder? As a business owner, I would be embarrassed to admit that! If an employee refused to perform a quality control checklist, to ensure a job is done right the first time, he or she would be shown the door. That’s me!
The Big Boys Don’t Run | They Give and Then Expect
The “big boys” (i.e. auto manufacturers) don’t run from employee opposition. Giving an employee the pay they’ve agreed upon, a safe and clean work environment, and the tools to do their job, those big boys believe it’s reasonable to mandate quality control systems as part of the employee’s job. I have to agree with that!
As a result, big boys reduce errors; in some cases, close to zero. Imagine, mistakes in your company reduced to one percent or less. Now that’s a wonderful life! Most small business owners can’t imagine that, because they don’t believe strict system controls will work in their company.
Truth is, most small business owners don’t have a clue what their current errors are costing them. The reason is, they have NO system for measuring waste, other than a wild guess. Therefore, they have no factual proof to show employees the COST of waste, leaving the owner with no moral authority to hold employees accountable.
Mistakes out of sight are soon out of mind! Sadly, most business owners will wait until the next time the SAME error occurs, and then get upset all over again. Another song and dance around the root cause of errors, but nothing changes.
The Prevention System | Proof’s in the Pudding
The big boys, along with small manufacturing and service companies, are wise to use a PREVENTION SYSTEM called, Corrective Action System. Whereby, mistakes are documented, and root causes are identified, along with those responsible for the error; more importantly, the cost.
With this information, business owners can show employees proof-positive results. In other words, are the systems that are responsible for eliminating errors, working or NOT working?
Consequently, wouldn’t any reasonable employee, shown PROOF that systems ARE working, welcome a prevention system?
Did I mention? Great systems work!
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