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To keep your business out of court, use checklists
By Lauren | January 8, 2010
Continuing my Friday series on keeping your business out of court, let’s talk about a humble tool that can work miracles when it comes to minimizing your litigation risk. Believe it or not, simple checklists can be a litigaton lifesaver for you and your company. Here’s why:
Many businesses offer services that involve standard routines. Whether you’re coloring hair, stirring up a gourmet dinner or conducting a medical exam, there are certain steps that you need to complete every single time. And then there’s the review process. If every work product you produce is supposed to undergo three levels of peer review before going to the client, your company presumably has a reason for that requirement. If you skip a step, you can end up giving your customer a substandard product or missing a mistake that could have been corrected if you’d only caught it in time.
Trouble is, the more familiar you are with a particular process, the more likely you may be to skip an essential step. You think you remember what you’re supposed to do, but find out later that you dropped an important ball. Developing and, of course, using checklists for routine services and reviews can keep you from making that kind of mistake. And mistakes you prevent don’t come back later to bite you in court.
Memory may be falter, but paper doesn’t. Make checklists part of your company’s regular practices, and you can save yourself, your business and your customers a world of legal trouble.
Topics: Business Ethics, Risk Management, customer relations, ethics |
January 9th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Lauren,
Unfortunately, I have not read the other discussions in your Friday series, but I like your focus here on prevention of potential legal situations.
The principle of prevention being better than cure, no doubt applies as much to potential legal situations as to any other area of life. Apart from the avoidance of potential negative situations, a focus on prevention leads to more of a proactive mindset and may stimulate ideas for process improvement. Your idea of checklists (a simple, commonsense way to ensure that appropriate procedures have been followed), represents a perfect example.
Focus on cure, on the other hand, is reactionary and is likely to lead only to band-aid solutions.