Checklists are important in your business – maybe now more than ever before
We are all living in a very strange and uncertain time, where the health of the nation matters more than anything else, and we all find ourselves clapping the key workers at 8pm every Thursday. Quite right!
We have all been asked to adjust our personal and working life so that we can collectively come through this. Staying at home, not seeing friends and family, not going out seems weird enough. Put that together with working from home, whilst trying to manage your business, with your team doing the same, you probably feel like it’s hard enough to work and manage day to day, without having to plan for the next few weeks and months.
Whatever situation your business is in, you are having to adjust to a new way of working. You might be delivering to your local community, you might be open for business with social distancing rules in place, you might be spending more time than ever before on the phone to suppliers and customers offering reassurance and commitment or you might be managing with a minimal team all working from home.
It’s difficult to plan, to navigate a route though this, but for the future of your business and the security of your team, this you must do.
Using checklists will bring focus to what is required, give everyone in your team direction and transparency of priorities.
If you use checklists already, then you’ll already know how valuable they can be. If you’ve never used them before, now is the perfect time to try and bring some order to your business and purpose to your team.
And when you get together with your team (virtually) having a checklist of a few ‘business critical’ tasks for each of your team to do will give them value and a sense of worth.
Remember these are nervous times for your team, used to coming into the office every day, knowing what that day had in store and leaving at the end of that day, feeling accomplished and knowing what tomorrow would bring.
Now they are working from home, managing parents, a partner, children, home schooling or just working alone, either way they are worried about the future, their role in the future of your business and their role right now.
Having regular check-ins with a transparent and concrete list of tasks provides reassurance.
You could use the list every day (if that is how often you connect) or every week. It will change, items will be removed, added to, but it must be the critical tasks to ensure that you, your team and your business can remain viable.
Marie Kondo, bestselling author of ‘Joy at Work – Organising your Professional Life’ says:
“Never underestimate the power of a physical list, for all to see, it focuses the minds of all of your team on the tasks in hand, just remember to make your own physical and emotional well-being top priority”.
I think we can all agree with that.
